
{3ass_ 
Book. 



THE BETTER SELF. 



By the same Author. 
THE GENTLE LIFE. 

1st Series, 2ist Edition; 2nd Series, 6th Edition. 

The essence which underlies all true chivalry is in these 
rJj^t TriUh honour, uprightness are all therej tenderness 

book is sterling.-^z^^^«^^ Churchman. 

feeling, and a cultivated intellect.- -Daily ^ews. 

^It excellent object sought to be attained by some pleasant 



I 



MBRARY 
NOV'141890 



Better Self 



ESSAYS FOR HOME-LIFE. 



BY 

J. H4IN FRISWELL, 

V N 

AUTHOR OF ''the GENTLE LIFE." 



The State, or Individual [or Writer], thrives the best who dives 
deepest down into the masses of the people, and adapts itself to 
the wants of the greatest number. — W. E. Gladstone. 

That which is nearest us touches us most. The passions rise 
higher at domestic than at Imperial tragedies. — Samuel Johnson, 



PHILADELPHIA : 
PORTER & COAT E S, 

822 CHESTNUT STREET. 






By Transftf 
JUN 5 1907 



> 



THIS VOLUME 
IS WITH GREAT RESPECT AND BY PERMISSION 
DEDICATED TO 

THE BARONESS BURDETT-COUTTS, 

WHOSE CONSTANT AIM 

HAS BEEN TO HELP OTHERS TO ATTAIN 

A BETTER SELF. 



^3 



PREFACE. 



This book by no means concerns the best self 
or the highest ideal, but simply a move upwards 
towards something a little higher than the dead 
flat upon which we have, of late, settled. uTo those 
who live noble and high lives even in imagination, 
which is by far the most trodden path, the essays 
in this volume will seem but tame and homely. Is 
this, they will ask — this life of ordinary courtesy, 
simple and pure affection, and humdrum honesty— the 
better life ? The answer is. Yes, it is ; I because 
pretence, sham, and disguise are as rife now as in 
the days when the Voice cried in the wilderness and 
pointed out the straight path, which was, even to the 
soldier — not desertion of his work nor brand-new 



viii PREFACE, 

heroism — but simple duty to oppress no one, and " to 
be content with his pay." That was the better hfe 
to him. 

It would be easier to advise higher things. In 
all things pretence and swagger predominate to- 
day ; in few matters more than in literature, and in 
religious, and so-called pious, literature especially. 
The self-sacrificing but coldly unnatural person of 
the tracts, the very best of them, translated into the 
ordinary cold-hearted religionist, who always looks 
after his own comfort, and whose words are fire 
while his deeds are ice, has done more harm to the 
faith than thousands of opponents. There are not 
two or three, but dozens of so-called Christian pub- 
lications, that never speak soul to soul, and that 
young men look at with a sickening, and good 
men with a mournful sinking sensation of the 
mental stomach, which proves at once that that 
unerring guide, the conscience, has found them out 
to be — cant. Nor are they alone. This exaggerative 
assumption — this adulteration of the milk of human 
kindness by something which will atone for its 
miserable dilution by a rich smack — this silk surface 



PREFACE. ix 

to the cotton dress pervades all literature ; criticism 
of art, and that which touches the highest things 
especially. Something of the rejective sickness 
spoken of may certainly be felt when we read an 
article in an aesthetic review, by Brown-Brown on 
the picture or poem of Smith-Smith who is of his 
own school. Mild indeed is this phrase if we 
recall the bare and bald indecencies of the slums 
— I speak with no exaggeration — and the nasti- 
nesses of foul-mouthed vulgar boys so freely used 
in a halting prose by an American poet, which 
has been praised as the high fruit of genius, and 
the soul music of the future. 

But we taste nothing pure. The great dread of 
the present age is adulteration. There is no man 
who can assure you that the cod-liver oil or quinine 
on which the life of his dearest one may depend is 
genuine and without admixture ; the high passion of 
the poet is simulated ; we strut where we should 
walk, and talk goody rather than are good. Hence 
the present volume may seem to have taken a quiet 
and lowly tone indeed when it rehearses to those 
who are so pure on the platform, and so hard at 



X . PREFACE, 

home or in business, the few simple graceful reaHties 
which form the better self 

It may be necessary to add, that owing to a 
long and constant illness, which has rendered daily 
work always irksome and sometimes impossible, this 
work has been a long time on hand, as some of the 
Essays will bear witness. Its name was to have 
been '' The Higher Life," but as that title was subse- 
quently appropriated by another writer — the Rev. 
Baldwin Brown — the present one has been adopted, 
and, consequently, a more subdued tone has been 
taken throughout the volumes. 

Fair Home, 

Bexley^ January^ iS75' 




U^y^r- 



u 




CONTENTS. 



L Beginning at Home 

11. The very Young Children 

in. The Girls at Home 

IV. The Wife's Mother 

V. Our own Flesh and Blood 

VI. Feeling for Others 

VII. Friends and no Friends 

VIII. Advice Gratis 

IX. Pride in the Family 

X, Sneers and Ill-nature 

XI. Discontent and Grumbling 

XII. The Luxury of Woe 

XIII. Grievances 

XIV. Delicate Feelings ... 
XV. The Proper Touch 



PAGE 

I 

12 
23 

35 
47 
58 
69 
81 
91 

lOI 

114 
126 
130 

146 
157 



xii CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



XVI. LooKjNG Forward ... ... ••• ••• ^^^ 

XVII. Good Nature, Temper, and Humour ..-, i77 

XVIII. The Contented Mind ... ... ••• 1^9 

XIX. Domestic Economy ... ... ••• ^oo 

XX. Expectancy ... ... ... ••■ — ^^° 

XXL On Keeping People Down ... ... 221 

XXII. Generous Approval ... ... ..^ ... 233 

XXIII. Likes and Dislikes ... ... — 245 

XXIV. On Falling Out ... ... ... ••• 255 

XXV. Pretension and Sentiment ... ... 267 

XX'VI. False Pretences ... ••• — ••• 279 

XXVII. Peace ••» ••• ••• ••' ••• 290 



THE BETTER SELR 



BEGINNING A T HOME. 

Where better to begin ? We are in " a parlous state, shep- 
herd ! '^ as Touchstone tells the simple William in the 
forest, and the nations around are perhaps not better than 
we. The best men amongst us have seen this. 

" We are a people drowned in hypocrisy, saturated with 
it to the bone. Alas ! it is even so, in spite of far other 
intentions at one time, and of a languid, dumb, but ineradi- 
cable inward protest against it still : and we are beginning to 
be universally conscious of that horrible condition, and by 
no means disposed to die in behalf of continuing it! It has 
lasted long, that unllessed process; process of 'lying to 
sleep in the Devil's Pickle ' for above two hundred years 
(I date the formal beginning of it from the year 1660, 
and desperate return of Sacred Majesty, after such an 



2 THE BETTER SELF. 

ousting as it had got) ; process which appears to be now 
about complete." 

Thus far outspoken Carlyle. You will not find that 
the newspapers generally tell you this, those especially with 
the largest circulation in the world — those with sparkling 
leaders, making all comfortable, and urging that it is well 
with us — speaking peace, look you, where there is no peace. 
"Hypocrisy!" they would cry; ^Svhy, there is no such 
good honest fellow in the world as John Bull !" Mean- 
time, how goes it? "Fifty years ago," said a friend to 
Carlyle, " in the middle of Germany when you were going 
to a shop to purchase, wise people would advise you : ' If 
you can find an English article, buy that ; it will be a few 
pence dearer, but it will prove itself a well-made, faithful, 
and skilful thing — a comfortable servant and friend to you 
for a long time — better buy that.' And now directly the 
reverse advice is given : * If you find an English article, 
don't buy that ; that will be a few pence cheaper, but it will 
prove only a more cunningly devised piece of mendacity 
than any of the others — avoid thai above all.' " * 

Both of these pieces of advice are good and true. Here 
is the advertising dodge result — the largest box of matches, 

* In justice to our country one must say that much of the obloquy 
on English goods is gained through forgeries of English trade marks, 
and that where a fair price is paid, true English work is always, in 
spite of grumblers, soundly good. 



BEGINNING AT HOME. 3 

that will not light ; the biggest knife, that will not cut ; the 
cheapest axe, that flies in splinters, and cuts your leg 
instead of the tree ; the largest, most illustrated, and worst 
weekly periodical, that does not contain one wholesome 
thought in it; the cheapest pound of soap, that will not 
cleanse; and sugar sold at no profit except on the sand mixed 
with it, and the paper that wraps it, thick and heavy, bought 
at a penny a pound and retailed at fourpence, and always 
weighed with it. No wonder that when people practise 
wholesale cheating we are all awake to the " dodges " of 
trade. Each knows his own weakness ; each is therefore — 
as we universally judge others by ourselves — painfully alive 
to universal hypocrisy. Not cheapest, but best, should be 
the tradesman's motto. There is such security, such happi- 
ness, such bravery in doing a good thing and selling a good 
thing. A good tradesman is a noble man if he gives good 
measure, sells sound articles, and does his duty. He is a 
wise man, too. 

And now, how to get rid of Carlyle's accusation, which 
is felt by all of us to be too true ? There is but one answer 
— begin at home. Let us each make our homes true, take 
a true view of life, ensure truth always and everywhere, pull 
off the phantom sham ; rise, be men, be proud of being- 
working men, shopkeepers, poor parsons, writers, tradesmen, 
or lawyers, so that we do our best" and follow out~shrink- 
ingly enough, perhaps, at first — what we know to be true. 



4 THE BETTER SELF. 

An evening paper has lately been sneering at the educa- 
tion of working men, '' our future masters." But surely they 
are educated — educated enough to know the false from the 
true, the humbug from the honest man ; they have a heart 
and conscience within them ; and, appealed to generously, 
trusted without suspicion, they will not fail us. But they 
and the middle classes are getting wTong views of life in the 
hurry of the world, and the general worship of riches, and 
the race to make fortunes. Yet, the universal testimony 
of rich men is, that the fortunes themselves are not worth 
having; that moderate occupation is the best and the happiest 
existence ; while rich and poor, wise and simple, all men 
who have ever lived, so that they are honest, will tell you that 
the real satisfaction worth having, unsurpassed, not to be 
taken away in this world, and to be well rewarded in the 
next, is to do your duty. Who in the lower class beats his 
wife, terrifies his children, shames his neighbourhood, but 
the poor lazy wretch who has not done his duty, and, angiy 
with himself, in some devil's fashion of quid pro quo, avenges 
his self-inflicted unhappiness on others ? Who comes home 
smiling, stays at home, does all the good he can, and makes 
the place around him happy, but the man who has done 
his duty, and who feels satisfied with himself? That's 
the man of whom England is proud. That's the man who 
does not rail against the rich, nor scold the aristocracy, 
nor bellow down the Lords, because he knows that he is 



BEGINNING AT HOME, 5 

as good a Lord as any of them. He is the sort of man 

who 

** Would shake hands with the king upon his throne. 
And think it honour to his Majesty ! '* 

And that is the man who would quietly require the king to 
do his duty if need came, and would look that it were done, 
too. He is the true Conservative who keeps up his own 
worth, and adds materially to the dignity of the nation. 
That man gets his strength from home ; it is what we do 
there that concerns us most ; it is there that the virtues are 
nursed, and the heart, at peace with itself, turns, as the 
flower does to the sun, to the God of peace, and gains from 
Him light and strength. Let us all be wisely selfish in 
keeping up home and the home affections. 

And, first, to the head of the house, the house-band of 
our good old English and much-meaning tongue ; it is well 
that he should be reverenced, with love. Foolish fathers 
who vacate their dignities do not have hopeful sons. Don't 
believe either in silly talking or viciously speaking fathers, 
nor in those whose love never shines forth in pleasant 
smiles. Napoleon loved the man who held with a steel 
hand, covered with a silk glove; so should the father be- 
gentle, but firm. Of the mother in a house, it is difficult to 
speak otherwise than of one worthy of the very highest and 
noblest esteem and aifection. The father should always 
pay a courtly deference to her, and his children will take 



6 THE BETTER SELF. 

their cue from him. This n^hen the mother is a true one, a far 
more usual case than the cheap wits whose cue it is to laugh 
at commonplace virtues will allow. When the father shows 
he respects and loves his wife, the children, too, love and 
respect her. VPeople may talk as much as they like about 
new forms of female industry, and new branches of trade, 
to give them an equal chance with man ; but the universal 
desire and instinct shown by woman towards marriage — \ 
much more so than by man — indicates that the true pro- 
vince of woman is to be at home, the queen of the home. 
The throne may be a poor one ; blankest poverty may sur- 
round it, long struggles may have made it sad, fortune may 
never have smiled upon it ; but when a woman has a hus- 

i band's love, when her children can and do arise and call \ 

) her blessed, then it is a throne indeed. 

f ^ And for children. It will be an apocalypse to some to 
insist that, under any faith or philosophy, to have, bring 
up, and well educate children, is the chief end of life, which, 
look you, is not man-ruling, teaching, preaching, governing ; 
still less is it man-kil nj, drilHng, and marching; nor is it 
skating, dancing, billiard-playing, and bird-shooting wholly; 
. ncr is it only a trading, cheating, and money-getting affair, but 
to produce fine, well-limbed, well-minded, sound-hearted boys 
and girls, and thence men and women. Well, as far as we 
can judge, the great Creator desires souls purified by earthly 
trials, and we opine that those who present a long list of 



BEGINNING AT HOME. 7 

such jewels to the King of kings, will have done notable 
work. 

Now-a-days people tell us that their children are held to 
be impoverishing, and somewhat of a bore. *'We push 
them," say they, " a great deal too much off to school 
masters;" and we think that what they say is true. ''What 
is the cause of this ? " asks a friend. " I am afraid that, if 
we visit our neighbours, and ask the reason, we shall find that 
the parents do not consider it their duty to attend to their 
own children." They fancy that if they send their children to 
the Sunday school, and there let them be instructed in some 
way as to their religion by the parson, and by the school- 
master as to manners and letters, all will be well ; and this 
lapse of duty on the parent's part makes the widening rent 
between parent and child still wider. \ The people in the 
United States and Australia are worse off than we are here. 
Young men of forty in America and the EngHsh colonies are 
called by their own lanky sons of fifteen '' darned old forri- 
ners." The young men soon feel themselves to be of value 
there, and throw off parental authority. But here, also, 
where the parents toil far into middle life for the benefit of 
their children, the case is no better. Every day the boys 
and girls are increasing in forwardness, boldness, rudeness 
and impudence. We don't say this merely to find fault with 
the children themselves ; t/iey know no better. Boys and 
girls will ape and imitate men and women, if they are not 



8 THE BETTER SELF. 

taught to be children. The manners of men and women, 
and the older fashions of speaking and acting which are 
well enough in a man, look impudent, and are impudent, 
in a boy, where bashfulness and modesty should be con- 
spicuous. In all our great towns there are to be seen troops 
of young boys and girls walking out, the boys following the 
girls, chaffing, courting, quizzing, and indulging in worse 
courses, at an age whereat their fathers and mothers were, 
and their contemporaries and age-fellows of the better classes 
are, scarcely out from the nursery. 

Over fondness, insufficient authority, a fear of slapping a 
child, or of using the rod early in life, whereby parents are 
prevented from using it late, and a spendthrift anticipation 
by the children of the pleasures of youth before they are 
youths, have produced these results : — 

(i.) After some years of boredom, the father and mother 
are so bothered with their children that they want to get rid 
of them. (2.) The children, not feeling the proper respect 
for their parents, do not show it. (3.) A division exists in 
the home, and universally, children, instead of being held to 
be one of God's greatest blessings, are considered a misfor- 
tune. " Ah, poor man ! he has so many children to bring 
up," &c. The home then becomes not a home, but merely 
a dull, cheerless place to sleep in, to rest at night in — no 
more. 

" I wish," says one of the victims to a rather different 



BEGINNING AT HOME. 9 

but analogous state of things to that above described, " that 
Preachers and Teachers generally would imbue parents with 
a sense of the duty of making home more cheer fair Our 
friend then gives an account of his own experience, to show 
us what kind of reform is necessary for parents to make 
their homes "more hvely and encouraging, so as to keep 
their children from seeking pleasure and excitement else- 
where.'' He draws a picture of a severe religious man of 
fifty, a good firm man, no doubt, but one in whom the prin- 
ciple of love is left out ; a Dissenter and a teetotaller, 
severely so as to both ; no argument is started but the father 
overbearingly puts it down ; the very mention of drink 
" rouses his arguing power, and he becomes offensive." He 
hates little indulgences. Any novels, any dramatic readings 
or entertainments are bad ; to enter a theatre or a music-hall 
would be perdition. If bagatelle or cards were introduced 
they would be thrown out of the window ; a draught, chess, 
or domino board is equally hated, and of course banished. 
In fact, this "powerful" example of ours has just rubbed 
the bloom off the plums, and plucked up the flowers of life. 
The children are good and industrious, but feel home to be 
a prison. To get to the City at nine, to leave at seven, to 
have tea, then to read a religious book, for the most part 
stupidly written, seems to be the fate of the young men of 
such families. Music is a frivolity, and although there are 
two withdrawing-rooms and a piano, the rooms are empty 



lo THE BETTER SELF, 

during the week days, and none of the graces of life are 
allowed to flourish. On Sundays, of course, there is harder 
work, hearing sermons and reading tracts ; and on Monday 
the dull, sad week begins again. 

This picture is from life : what shall we say of it ? Why, 
that our severe man of fifty goes the right way to bring up 
li^pocrites. " On the sly," the young men smoke ; on the 
sly, they run into music-halls; on the sly, they do worse 
things. 'Tis no new thing. The old proverb says that 
" Clergymen's sons always turn out badly." Why? Because 
the children are brought up surfeited with severe religion — 
not with the gentle, true religion of Christ, who was himself 
reproved by the prototypes of such severe men. In one of 
Grabbers tales, wherein he begins quaintly — 

** Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire, 
Was six feet high, and look'd six inches higher," 

that great painter of Nature shows how the sternness of the 
father nearly spoils the child. 'Tis an old, old story; not 
bad nature, but bad taste made it severe. Not always do 
such foolish severities end with the tragedies of crime or 
death. Bitter the reflection then, if the father has reflection. 
Over the dead Absalom — a fair, beautiful body whence the 
soul has fled, a casket whence the precious jewel is stolen — 
you may cry for ever, " Oh Absalom, my son, my son ! " — to 
this earth he never can come back. But say the son does 



BEGINNING AT HOME. II 

not die, that his Hfe remains, from how many is the priceless 
jewel of Hfe, purity, honour, honesty, stolen by those into 
whose arms the cheerless home has driven them ! 

In a land which we are so fond of describing as being 
filled with Homes, and as being especially the most home- 
loving in the world, is it not useless to cry, " Behold how 
good and how pleasant a thing it is to dwell together in 
unity ! " The sister will be loved, honoured, and cherished ; 
the father, having sacrificed himself for the children in 
giving them his time, his love, his money, will find them 
ready to lay down their lives for his. Was there ever a more 
tender story than that of the Scottish henchman who went 
into battle with seven tall sons, and who placed one after 
another before his chief to shield him, and shouted out, as 
each fell, ^* another for Hector," till the whole seven died at 
the behest of the loyal old man ? Were they taught to shun 
home as a sham, or a prison, or as something unpleasant ? 
Did they not rather love it, though rough and rude as Lord 
Lovat's barbarous hold, as the abode of truth and love, 
kindliness, openness, and honesty, where smiles were plenti- 
ful, and tears were wiped away, and hearts were strength- 
ened, and father, mother, brothers, and sisters, formed a 
sheaf of arrows, which, when bound together, could not 
be injured by a giant, but if single could be broken by a 
child ) 



12 THE BETTER SELF. 



IL 

THE VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. 

In his amusing volumes, "From Waterloo to the Peninsula," 
in which with infinite spirit, curious learning, and a fidelity 
which is almost photographic and completely marvellous, 
the traveller puts before us all that he has seen; the author 
gives us a picture of an orange tree blossoming in the neigh- 
bourhood of the Escorial which we shall quote. And when 
we say that the traveller shows us "all that he has seen," we 
must accord to him the rarest faculty of observation, and the 
capacity of picking up more in ten minutes than an ordinary 
traveller would in ten days. Each of us has some gift. A 
boy we knew had the singular faculty of getting, in a wonder- 
fully short space of time, all the meat out of the many thin 
legs of a lobster — a feat which drives most of us to the verge 
of despair; and certainly Mr. Sala has the faculty of getting 
more out of any given country or scene than most people. 
But to the picture : — "Here the oranges grow tame and the 
orange trees grow wild; at this instant they are flowering, — a 
heavenly sight to see. To behold an orange tree in mil 



THE VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. 13 

bloom, v/ith its triple panoply of leaves, flowers, and fruit, is 
only equalled by that sight which is not to be seen out of 
England, that of a still young and beautiful woman with a 
little baby in her arms, and a grown-up daughter by her side. 
And for the life of you, you can't tell which of the three looks 
prettiest and comeliest." 

A true and pretty sentence is that, and only to be written 
by one who has looked upon small humanity with love; who 
has in his heart that fondness for children which most 
Englishmen have. The baby, the manikin, the homimaihcs^ 
as we may choose to call it, rules the world; and yet in New 
York and Paris they tell us babies are going out of fashion: 
and in baby-loving England, too, there are certain classes 
who regard children as a bore. 

But baby rules the world for all that. Ele is the prin- 
cipal being, although the softest and the smallest. He does 
nothing,— cannot, for the most part, speak, — merely crows, 
and blows little bubbles from his tiny mouth, — an occupa- 
tion in which he takes inconceivable pleasure; but yet his 
orders are obeyed, and his gentle tyranny most readily 
submitted to. Those little fists of his have never yet known 
how to black another's eyes, nor to beat a woman, except 
his mother; and yet his hand rules us, and we cannot escape 
from him. Neither has that hand yet been shut upon gold 
coin, nor has it carried a sceptre; nor has the round little 
head, covered with the silkiest hair, or bald as the skull 



14 THE BETTER SELF. 

of a centenarian, worn a coronet or a crown, or black funnel- 
shaped hat or bonnet, or a professor's black square mortar- 
board, or the tiara of the chief of all bishops ; and yet the 
little head is loved and tended more devotedly than if 
it held the imaginative brain of Shakspere, the wisdom of 
Bacon, or the plotting intrigue of Machiavelli. We suppose 
most babies have some hair on their heads, for Sir John 
Falstaff is careful to tell us "that he was bom about three 
of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head." 

All babies delight in "slobbering;" toothless gums, eyes 
without any meaning in them, pure and innocent as water, 
unwrinkled skins — for folds of fat cannot be called wrinkles 
— a pervading smell of violet powder, and a wet chin, — 
these, as far as our memory serves us, are the indications 
of babyhood. 

But about that cradle what mysteries hang ! Those 
tightly-clenched little hands may hereafter be the priestly 
and sacrificial hands of Abel, or the murderous fists of Cain; 
for when we are impacted of such soft flesh and blood as 
that there is no difference between saint and sinner. No, nor 
is there any difference in rank. St. Giles and St. James, 
Dives and Lazarus, look equally stately in the cradle — and 
in the grave. The greatest epicure and the most starved 
ascetic fare equally well upon mother's milk, and each sleeps 
as softly in his mother's arms. And while they are so asleep, 
listening from their mother's lap or Irom the rough cradle 



THE VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. 15 

to those mysterious noises which the poetic Irish call the 
"whisperings of angels," the fool and the philosopher are 
alike. That little head may, in after years, wear the scarlet 
hood of a doctor ; it may be freighted with all the learning 
of Vatel or Puffendorff, and give laws to nations. Wheaton 
and Blackstone were babies once ("la\vyers were babies 
once, I suppose^' said Charles Lamb, as if there was a doubt 
about the matter), but when they were babies, they perhaps 
only looked a little uglier than other babes. 

A very young child, too, has this advantage over a man : 
you can't tell whether he is a fool or not; whether he is a 
down-right idiot, or deaf and dumb. The bib and tucker 
cover all things ; like charity, they hide a multitude of faults; 
and if in that smooth, round noddle poor baby has no more 
brains than a billiard ball, a mother's love will believe that 
it is the head of a Solon. For dumb children crow and 
gurgle, and make inarticulate noises. Babies even conceal 
deafness, because we hope that they are perfect in their 
faculties. AVhat a touching story is that of a lady of great 
and high family, who was deaf and dumb herself, though the 
wife of an earl through her beauty alone. In due course 
the king o' the world, the baby, presented himself, — a fine 
child, of course, a future earl, one born to wear a velvet cap 
circled with gold, bearing aloft seven or nine pearls on 
spikes, and ornamented with gold strawberry leaves between 
these spikes ; a man who should hereafter be called cousin 



1 6 THE BETTER SELF. 

to the Queen, without any relationship or affinity, and should 
be styled Right Honourable, although he had lost all claim 
to honour. But with all his future honour he, too, might be 
deaf and dumb. We take our fathers' and mothers' titles ; 
but we also inherit their forms, their minds, and their follies. 
We have their fortunes and their lands, if they had any, and 
also the sin that is born in the blood, — the canker-worm 
that prevs upon the brain. And so, as the nurse sat 
watching over that babe, she saw the countess mother, mute 
as she was, approach the cradle with a huge china vase, 
lift it above the head of the sleeping child, and poise it to 
dash it down. Petrified with horror, wondering at the 
strange look of the mother's face, the nurse sat powerless 
and still ; she dared not even cry out; she was not near 
enough to throw herself between the victim and the blow. 
The heavy mass was thrown down with a tremendous force 
and crash — on the floor beside the cradle, and the babe 
awoke terrified and screaming, clung to his delighted 
mother ; and all the terrible antecedents were only prelimi- 
nary to that tentative blow, which should tell the mother 
whether her child had God's gift of voice and hearing, or 
was like herself, a mnte. 

The equality of mankind which is found in full force 
during babyhood, and which resumes its empire again in the 
grave, does not, as we have hinted, last long. The babies 
of the poor are perhaps as well off as any ; not perhaps a 



THE VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. 17 

workhouse brat, nor the infant of the starving tramp, but 
those cottage-born infants, those children of tlie workers 
whose daily labour produces enough for the wants oi the 
day — these are the happy ones. We are not all born, thank 
God ! like Miss Kilmansegg : — 

** She was one of those who, by Fortune's boon, 
Are born, as they say, with a silver spoon 

In her mouth , not a wooden ladle : 
To speak according to poets' wont, 
Plutus as sponsor stood at her font, 
And Midas rock'd the cradle.'^ 

And truly those who are the children of the rich have the 
least happy childhood. The Chinese, it is said, weep and 
cry when a child is born, and rejoice when it dies, as if it 
were to be congratulated in getting this dreadful bother of 
life over, and in having escaped the battle by being killed 
just on entering it. 

Rich children must suffer for their rank even in the 
cradle. There is some mysterious pleasure in playing in 
the gutter, and in making mud-pies; but of that the rich 
baby is ruthlessly deprived. Then, again, the children of 
the wealthy are turned over to the nurses ; and nurses 
(patient, good creatures as some of them are) are not so 
good as mamma ; for w^oman, splendid as she is in intellect, 
and excelling in the warmth of her maternal affection, — for 

c 



1 8 THE BETTER SELF. 

what man's love, we are asked, ever equalled a mother's ? * 
— will, upon the very least provocation, give over the most 
precious privilege of a mother to any one else. Wet-nurses 
suckle, and dry-nurses tend, the children of the great. The 
blood of the Plantagenets is nourished with the milk that 
rightfully belongs to the serf Richard Coeur-de-Lion, King 
of England, Lord of Aquitaine, soon grew fat upon " the 
lacteal food, which artfully and chemically combines all the 
most nutritious particles of nourishment," that was destined 
by Nature to nourish Higg, the son of Snell, the Saxon 
thrall. Now-a-days great ladies, princesses, and queens 
advertise for wet-nurses ; and our future lords and masters 
begin early in life to draw away the sustenance of the 
people. They thrive upon such sustentation ; and at a 
later period of life — say at six months or so — we are favoured 
with photographs of the most noble mother nursing the babe, 
and the highly serene father looking down complacently 
upon the future hope of the country or the kingdom , but 
the picture is a photographic delusion, and a pictorial snare. 
Of old, the mother of Moses gave up the chiM of the serf 
to be nurtured by the daughter of a king. Now-a-days we 
reverse the order, and the children of kings are nursed and 
tended by the daughters of the people. 

* We must confess that in the question there is considerable clap- 
trap. The father's love is often surely as great, but of a different 
de-^ree. 



THE VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. 19 

But by this the great ones do not gain : the pains and 
penalties fall upon the babies ; and the babies or young 
children of the very rich and the very poor have an ad- 
vanced intelligence, and a worn look on their countenances, 
that we do not see in the jolly faces of our middle-class 
children who get their rights. 

Mr. Catlin, the American traveller, in his curious book 
called Shut yoicr Mouthy maintains that the Indian babe is 
much better off than that of any other nation. Our babies 
(thanks to civilization) die so terribly fast : feather beds, bad 
nursing, heated air, and sleeping with their mouths open and 
their nostrils covered, he says, kill most. Ten, fifteen, or 
twenty a week are suffocated by sleeping with their parents in 
London only. Seven hundred thousand, nearly one million 
of children, are born every year throughout England ; and 
of these one hundred thousand die before they reach the age 
of one year. But with the rude American savages it is quite 
another thing. Catlin looked at the burial-places, where the 
skulls remain above the ground, and saw no babies' heads. 
'' None of our women die in childbirth," said the chief of 
the Pawnee-Picts, " and none of our babies die in teething ; 
we seldom lose a small child ; we have no medical attend- 
ants." Bad spirits, rum, fire-water, pills, doctors, ground 
wheat, instead of buffalo flesh and maize, and other 
benefits (?) of civilization have done their work now upon 
these tribes ; but it is still a fact that few children die, and 



20 THE BETTER SELF. 

that they are stronger and healthier than ours. Whisky and 
rum are kilHng away the red men and women ; but the babe 
of the savage, according to Mr. Cathn, has a veiy superior 
time of it to ours. 

Here let us put an important and true paradox by itself. 
Thousands of babies in well-fed England, and in the houses 
of the rich and well to do, are starved to death — by being 
overfed. 

Hence, no doubt, it is full time to admit women to a 
medical education. 

But whether in the palace or the wigwam, the baby 
is king ; the homtmaihis rules the world. Although he 
comes after us, he is preferred before us ; he shall sit in 
our seats, he shall look down upon us, and stand in our 
place of judgment. Strong as v/e are now, w^e shall be 
but we.ilv dust before his feet. For the baby the world 
exists and the heart of woman was created ; to him it opens 
and expands and blossoms like the rose ; even as the even- 
ing prhurose shuts up itself before the strong morning or 
noonday sun, but opens to the weaker light of the stars, so 
woman yields her chief love, her watchfulness, her care, 
herself, to babies. Between man and woman, even between 
man and wife, there is but an incomplete freemasonry. Man 
knows not all the pass-words to that heart, clever as he is ; 
whereas the baby is the Master Mason, and by right of 
birth Dasses at once through all degrees. What a bother 



THE VERY YOUNG CHILDREN. 21 

and a fuss women make about a babe who has only the 
third of a chiiiice of ever being a man ; for one-half of man- 
kind die before nve years are past, and hah^ of the other half 
before twenty years roll over their heads.. But think you 
not, or rather do you not know, that Mrs. Anne Hatha way- 
Shakspere made a gi'eat deal more fuss over young Hamnet 
Shakspere, who never lived to man's estate, and over Miss 
Judith and her sister, than ever she did over that most 
supreme man who ever lived — that most gracious, generous, 
loving, and humane heart — that head so regally endowed, 
that heart so tender, so full of sad, deep thoughts, and yet 
full strong, and manly, and true ? It is the man that we 
should make a fuss about; we should crown the veteran, 
not the raw recruit, with laurels. But for all we may say, 
and all the world can do, homunculus is our rival, our con- 
queror, and king : — 

** Baby lips will laugh me do-\vn ; my latest rival breaks my rest ; 
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast." 

And it is right that it should be so. The infants in 
IMacbeth's vision had circlets of gold above their baby brows. 
For them the future exists. For man, as soon as he is man, 
the trial Vvill be quickly over ; the hill will have to be de- 
scended ; the doors of this world will close on him ; and to 
him the next world will open. 

And to ensure his success and usefulness in this : his 



22 THE BETTER SELF. 

own happiness as well as that of others which depends on 
him, to make him cultivate his better-self, it is of supreme 
importance that he should not be spoiled in the cradle. 
The mothers, when soft-hearted and soft-headed too, are 
those who first ruin our very young children. 



( 23 ) 



III. 

THE GIRLS AT HOME. 

Of the selfish and hard-hearted essayists, the heroine of the 
"Village on the Cliff" thus speaks. She first reads in a 
weekly review the review of a novel, and next of a new piece 
of poetry; and she then turns to an essay. "It was something 
about women and about marrying ; about feebleness and in- 
aptitude and missing their vocation ; about the just dislike of 
the wo7'ldfor the persons who could not conduce to its amusement 
or comfort. Catherine pushed it away impatiently ; she did 
not waat to read in black and white what she knew so well 
already — what she had always to read in the black and 
white of day and of night — what, with unconscious philo- 
sophy, she had tried so hard to ignore." 

The fact is so often thrust under our noses, that we 
suppose it useless to deny that of which there is so little 
doubt, that the world is getting abominably selfish. If 
any of the " clever " wTiters — whom some hold to be wrong, 
mistaken, and to objurgate to order — were to write upon 
sisters, they would do so in the style which Miss Thackeray 



24 THE BETTER SELF. 

so dislikes, but which so well tallies with the seLishness of 
the age that it has become popular. To be a clever critic, 
one, it seems, must be ill-natured ; and to be ^' true, so true 
to Nature," as people have it, the writer must rehearse in an 
article as much thorough selfishness as Rochefoucauld's 
whole book contains. 

Sisters, with these fine writers, w^ould be regarded as a 
" mistake ; " for they neither add to the riches nor to the 
position of a family. Brindley, who thought that God 
Almighty made rivers merely to feed "navigable canals,'' 
the superfine writer in the Day who spoke of the choicest 
flowers in their glorious pride as "almost as beautiful as 
textile fabrics," and the selfish young husband who thought 
his wife " the most expensive piece of furniture in his 
house," might alone compete with those wTiters who would 
lower the dignity of womanhood by some mean comparison, 
in which all the beauty of sisterhood would be destroyed. 
^ We should be told that kissing one's sister w^as like minced 
C veal, without flavour; that to take one's sister out was a 
' " bore ; " that sisters were generally in the way ; that they 
impoverished an ancient house, and did not mend matters 
in a new one ; and that the only consolation afforded by the 
contemplation of them was, that unless you had sisters other 
people would not have them, and that other people's sisters 
were pleasant to look at, to dance and to flirt with, and that 
when one's extremely selfish life was about half run, it would 






THE GIRLS AT HOME, 25 

be time to marry, so that one could secure a wife and a 
nurse at the same time. 

A great deal of this sort of stuff, of which it is hardly 
worth while to stoop to say that it is as foolish as it is 
false, is running over in our journals and magazines, and its 
repetition makes it credited. 

The stupid, pig-headed boy at a school is laughed at and 
kept in order so long as a certain number of higher natures 
1 estrain him ; but when he finds that his side increases in 
numbers, he cries out boldly that the true policy is to shirk 
the lessons and spend the cricket money upon tarts. Num- 
bers believe in him, and stupidity and gluttony rule the day. 
We may laugh as we like, now we are indulging in the 
nobler occupations of reading novels of bigamy and police 
reports, about the fine heroes and heroines of Sir Walter 
Scott, and the bombastic fervour of Claude Melnotte ; but 
in the days when Scott Avrote and Lord Lytton was a young 
man, if a man had broached such sentiments in the club 
as are now printed in fair type and on cream-laid paper, he 
would have been scouted. When Sir Philip Sidney wrote, 
he dedicated his chief w^ork to his " dear lady and sister the 
Countess of Pembroke," declaring that she '^ was most dear 
and most worthy to be most dear," and that " her desire to 
his heart was an absolute command;" and for a long, long- 
time in English home histoiy this noble love of a brother to 
a sister, of the strong to the weak, existed, and we hope it is 



26 THE BETTER SELF. 

not now entirely extinct. We have not yet sunk into such 
mere utilitarians that we can afford to pull up by the roots 
all the flowers of life. And a sister's love is indeed one of 
the precious things of life, and one, too, that will last beyond 
this life. We shall have no woes in Heaven, it is certain ; 
but we shall all be brothers and sisters ; and to the truly 
noble it is as Browning has it in the " Blot on the 'Scut- 
cheon," the pure love that a brother bears to a sister must 
exceed all other loves — 

* ' For see, now only see ! there's no alloy 
Of earth that creeps into the perfect'st gold 
Of other loves — no gratitude to claim ; 
You never gave her life — not even the dross 
That keeps life — never tended her, instructed. 
Enrich' d her ; so your love can claim no right 
O'er hers, save pure love's claim. '^ 

But in an age when everything is tested just for what it will 
fetch, and every gentleman is estimated according to the 
weight of gold that he has about him — when there are no 
honours given by the Court to virtue or nobihty of mind, 
and peerages are bestowed merely as a reward for political 
services (and if we are to judge the present from the past, 
say from the Greville papers, what are these services?), 
perhaps we need not be surprised that this freedom from 
earthliness is so little appreciated. 

f Truest beauty is oftentimes of the truest use, if not the 
most apparent ; and any one who knows life well will speak 



THE GIRLS AT HOME. 27 

with due honour as to the utiHty of sisters. Even in the 
houses of the very poor, where the battle of hfe is a mere 
series of long struggles, and the constant demands of the 
world harden the heart and deaden the feelings, the girls ot 
the family are the most self-sacrificing and the best. A 
somewhat wide knowledge of the poor — a knowledge which 
has opened and informed the heart that it has touched — 
enables the wTiter to aver that he has hardly ever known a 
struggling family which has not depended m.ore upon the 
goodness and the tenderness of the girls than of the boys. It 
is the sisters of the house that keep life sweet. It is the sister 
who cares for poor father, or who preserves to the last the 
\ memory of the mother. Well may the mother say, " A son 
is a son till he gets him a wife j a daughter's a daughter all 
her life." It is the daughter who keeps everybody right, \i 
she can ; and who, when anybody goes wrong, shields him 
with her ready excuses and her love, and who, when he goes 
right, has recalled his better-self. And perhaps there is 
not a more piteous sight in the world than to see a good and 
pure woman proffer an excuse for the folly that she detests, 
and for the sin that she abominates. How often has a pure 
and good sister to sit at home and watch the downfall of a 
bright, clever brother, led away merely from love of gaiety, 
and brought, step by step, to the brink of ruin by the very 
good nature and ease which has made him charming in his 
sister's eyes ! \ 



28 THE BETTER SELF. 

Nature, which, bound by the golden chains of God's 
great lavvs, never errs, has implanted in the married pair 
a desire for oiispring, and for offspring of both sexes. 
There are always more boys than girls born ; and in 
families where the males predominate, the longing for a 
girl child is always great. That the Hebrews praised God 
when a man child was born is true enough, because the 
tribe sought increase, and the male only carried the name ; 
but in many families in England the birth of a girl causes 
more rejoicing than that of a boy. And not without reason. 
Families that are composed of boys only, grow up rude and 
selfish, very hard, brusque, and unfeeling. The process of 
education, which begins as soon as a child is born, loses all 
its tenderness, all its sweetness, when girls are wanting. 
The extreme difference between the nature of. children is 
seen at once by parents; that, however, which exists 
between girl and boy nature, can only be duly observed 
by mothers who, having come from a family of girls, first 
observe what a boy is in their o\xXi offspring. " I would not 
have believed, sir," said one of these, "that I could have 
been the mother of such a monster !" The monster had 
only been asserting his manliness (he was a fine boy of five 
or six) in the usual way. He was greedy, gluttonous, apt 
to quarrel, ready to strike, happy to kill and exterminate 
smaller life, cruel, hardy, fearless unless surprised, cunning 
and watchful after his own little games, as boys of that age 



THE GIRLS AT HOME. 29 

generally are. He was an iinlicked cub, an unpolished 
child of nature ; something like that happy young American 
of whom Mr. Pogram spoke in his capital ** oration." *' He," 
said Pogram, of one of these rough ones, aged about 
twenty, "is a true-born child of this free hemisphere ! 
verdant as the mountains of our country ; bright and flowin' 
as our mineral licks ; unspiled by withering convention- 
alities, as air our vrild and boundless Perearers. Rough 
he may be, so air our barrs ; wild he may be, so air our 
buifalers ; but he is a child o' Natur, and a child o' Free- 
dom ; and his boastful answer to the tyrant and the despot 
is that his bright home is in the settin' sun." 

This speech, said to be transcript of American "oratings," 
exhibits the roughness and wild bcastfulness of a boy nation, 
before civilization has fully worked upon it. Boys in our 
own country would be just as ridiculous, only happily they 
vrould be tamed down and laughed at. But as civilization 
and the knowledge of sister nations reform, purify, and 
elevate a nation, so sisters in a family improve and elevate 
the boys. How much we all owe to them we can hardly 
say ; our debt is never acknowledged ; is this so because it 
is so large that we know not how to calculate the amount ? 

Brothers, in their turn, doubtlessly improve sisters ; and 
indeed girls without brothers are too delicate and whim- 
sical lor the world. Yet the affection of sisters for each 
other is as remarkable as it is beautiml, and the love of 



30 THE BETTER SELF. 

women for each other — the parallel and antithesis to the 
friendship of David and Jonathan — may be said to surpass 
the love of man. When a very affectionate heart has no 
true sister, it will frequently take up with a mere stranger, 
and lavish all its love upon her. Thus the two ladies of 
Llangollen, who carved the wood-work of their own house, 
and made themselves remarkable for their friendship, were 
simply friends who had bound themselves to a celibate 
and sisterly life. 

When there are many children in a family, and the first 
one is a girl, and added to this, the family is somewhat 
poor, the sacrifices which that eldest sister makes are 
unknown. What she is called upon to do, how good she 
is, how inexhaustible is the supply of love that she finds 
in her sisterly-motherly heart, only those who have had 
such an elder sister can imagine. \How, day by day, the young 
thing grows old and anxious-looking, from the many cares 
thrust upon her ; how butcherly and bakerly troubles early 
oppress her; how she gradually finds out the monetaiy 
secrets of the family, and that father can't meet that little 
bill ; how she learns to excuse and put off, to coax the 
tradesmen, and to put the best face on things to casual 
callers and guests ; how she patches clothes, and schemes 
with the money : and in all this business, true to the flag of 
the family, forgets all save i,ts interests, fights for one 
brother's apprenticeship, gets out the second sister as a 



THE GIRLS AT HOME. Z\ 

governess, and the third sisLer married, and gradually sinks 
into a half-honoured old age without a thought for herself, 
and only partly appreciated — those who have known such 
good women will readily acknowledge. In the sacred story 
there is one instance where much is forgiven, because the 
love shown to the Saviour was much. It seems to us that 
a great part of the glorious army of Martyrs will be made 
up of those angels who, while they wore flesh about them, 
were kno^vn as elder sisters. 

The sister, moreover, is at once the support of the 
father, mother, and brother. She honours the father more 
than any one, and loves her mother with a deeper love even 
than do her brothers ] she is the chronicler of the family, 
when it is in good circumstances, and believes in the 
blood. land culture which it possesses, and in all the fine 
storie'^ that Burke tells in his Peerage and Baronetage — 
how Sir Lancelot Smith fought at the battle of Tewkesbury, 
and another Smith struck the first blow at Flodden; how 
Bobus Smith intrigued with Lord Holland, and another 
Smith was chief commissariat officer in the Peninsula, and 
was praised by Wellington himself. She will tell all about 
William's college honours, and try to understand the 
financial concerns that David, the second son, is studying 
in the City, and the regimental stories which Herbert, the 
third brother, ^vrites home from India. She thoroughly 
keeps the family together, and elevates it in the opinion 



32 THE BETTER SELF. 

of all by the honest and great thoughts which she has 
about it. 

Beyond all this, sisters in a family are a great gain. 
They enable men to form some ideal of women who are 
beyond suspicion, and who do not even " set their caps " 
at every man and try to get married as quickly as they 
possibly can. 

A brother naturally believes in the goodness and the 
purity of his sisters. (Even in France, where "gallantry," 
as it is called, is an employment, a Frenchman believes 
in the purity of two women, that of his mother and his 
sister, although other people's mothers and sisters afford 
him, as he thinks, only fair subjects for a gallant attack^ 
(^So when in England we remember that all women are often 
represented as venal creatures, ready to entrap men, use- 
less — at best only rather cumbrously ornamental — we may 
look to our own sisters, and remember what they are and 
have been^ Very frequently such women save families from 
ruin ; often arrest the decay of virtue — which eventually is 
the decay of worldly prosperity — and almost always they 
exhibit quietude, piety, peace, holiness, and religion to 
us in the most beautiful phases. The old symbolists were 
not far wrong when they made Truth, Faith, Charity, and 
all other vniues in the female form. With sisters in a 
family, faith is more frequently retained and religion more 
sedulously cultivated than without them. The attacks on 



THE GIRLS AT HOME. 33 

faith generally begin when a man has got away from home ; 
and as young men are quick to change, and ready to receive 
any new thing, we need not be astonished when we hear 
of new " schools of thought ^' at college, nor of the students 
of the Polytechnic being all free-thinkers. Such attempts 
are, howxver, repulsed at home by the pure faith of the 
women of the household ; and there are few more touching 
or pathetic passages in English poetry than that in which 
Tennyson counsels a student to spare attacks on his sister's 
religion — 

" Oh thou that after toil and storm 

May seem to have reach'd a purer air 
Whose Faith has centre everywhere, 
Nor cares to fix itself to form, 

** Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 
Her early Heaven, her happy views— 
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse 
A life that leads melodious days." 

And it is these melodious days that make life pure and 
beautiful, like some deep strain of sacred music coming 
from the earth, but gradually dying away amongst the 
very air of Heaven itself. A conceited coxcomb, who 
knows how to doubt, and is not noble enough to believe, 
may try with shadowed doubt to disturb the faith of such 
a one, but he will not succeed. Goodness in herself is 
the personal basis of that faith : " Her faith through form 
is pure as thine ; her hands are quicker unto good ; " and 

D 



34 THE BETTER SELF. 

these, like the coats of Dorcas, shall be her witnesses. And 
although the sister in well-to-do families be no bread earner, 
and may be neither pretty enough nor clever enough to 
add to the credit of the family, oftentimes her sweetness 
and goodness call down blessings upon it, or, what is 
much the same, carry the blessings with them. *^ Oh, my 
Sophia," says the good-hearted and repentant Tom Jones, 
when, like the prodigal, he returns from wallowing in the 
troughs of the swine, ^* the purity of your sex can hardly 
comprehend the grossness of ours." That's true. It will 
be well if the lumbering conceit and grossness of some 
of our sex will try to understand and reverence the purity 
and goodness of their sisters. 



^ f-^-n) — . 

LIBRARY 
N0VM1390 



IV. 

THE WIFE'S MOTHER. 

In a sarcastic article on the Divorce Court, and upon 
the continued increase of divorce cases in this country, 
a smart essayist asserts that, in '' the opinion of an expert, 
drink and mothers-in-law are the chief agents in bringing 
about that conditional state of conjugal affairs which is 
apt to end in a decree ?iisV^ 

We do not, of course, know who the expert is ; but an 
officer of the Court, one whose mind was filled with the sad 
and immoral histories of cases there related, would no 
doubt be well able to discriminate and to point out the chief ' 
causes of domestic misery. With the strongest desire to be 
very lenient to mothers-in-law — nay, with a belief founded 
on some knowledge and experience, we are afraid that they 
too often are such causes, though we can assert that, as a 
rule, such ladies really desire to aid their sons and 
daughters ; that they are frequently generous, self-sacrificing, 
good, and loving; and that very few persons feel their 
positions more acutely than the poor ladies themselves. 



36 THE BETTER SELF. 

And perhaps, as midges sting and gnats bite with a per- 
sistence and a pain somewhat at variance with the size of 
the tormentors, mothers-in-law have felt the petty stings of 
sarcasm in the comic papers more acutely than graver 
attacks. Whenever a dull fellow wishes to show his smart- 
ness, he makes up a paragraph upon his wife's mother. 
Even Douglas Jerrold, a professed wit, found that in 
" Caudle's Curtain Lectures " he could not appeal to the 
feelings of his readers more effectually than by pouring a 
few columns of molten sarcasm on Mrs. Caudle's mother. 
The poor women thus attacked must recall the French 
maxim, Bel esprit, mauvais coeiir ; and this is generally or 
too often the case — for, unless we put down some of these 
attacks as a sorry kind of fun, we must confess that man 
is, as a rule, an ungrateful animal. 

Is it not the mother-in-law, before she assumes that 
obnoxious title — excellent and charming lady then — who 
encourages Edwin's affection for his Angelina? Is it not 
she who first sees merit in an awkward, heavy-looking boy, 
and persuades her husband that " they will make a fine 
young couple " ? Who but her mother has made Angelina 
what she is — has made her " sit straight," cured that stoop 
in her shoulders, forced her to be able to execute Kuhe's 
brilliant morceaicx, or Beethoven's wonderful inspirations, or 
to work up that thrilling sentimental song by Franz Abt, 
which, in Edwin's own vulgar tongue, "regularly did for 



THE WIFE'S MOTHER. 37 

him, and cooked his goose " ? Is it not to his mother-in- 
law that Edwin's Angehna owes what httle she knows of 
" Mangnall's Questions " and of cooking, of pies and poetry, 
sewing and sermons, dancing and divinity ? Who " ran to 
raise her when she fell, and kissed the place to make it 
well," but mother-in-law? Who pointed out to her the 
eligible and ineligible ** party " to be married ? W^ho re- 
joiced in her triumphs, and grieved over her defeats, more 
than the mother-in-law ? And who, as a rule, is a warmer 
partisan of the son-in-law; Benedick, the married man? One 
may very truly say of one's wife's mother that she is " a little 
less than kin and more than kind '^ towards her daughter's 
husband, and that no one experiences more ingratitude 
than she. 

This ingratitude is all the more poignantly felt because it 
proceeds chiefly from the being whom she has favoured. 
Like the eagle shot with an arrow winged with one of its 
own feathers, she may be said to have impelled the weapon 
which dealt the blow ; for, although in England much more 
than in France and Germany young ladies choose for them- 
selves, it cannot be denied that the bride's mother has much 
to do, as aforesaid, in making the match. And proverbially 
every mother thinks she has a prescriptive right to her 
daughter. To her, rather than to her son, she looks lor a 
iriend and a tuture home in her widowed and infirm years. 
The mother takes more notice and exhibits more affection 



38 THE BETTER SELF. 

towards the son when unmarried; winks at foibles and 
vices she would never dream of excusing in a daughter; 
allows him more latitude than she would a husband, but 
when he gets him a wife she does not desire to live with 
him — she prefers her married daughter's home. 

This is more true here than in France; for among many 
of the good things that we might borrow from our lively 
neighbours, to whom we fancy ourselves so much superior, is 
a very constant love and respect shown to the mother by her 
sons. Much of this may be romantic, but it is none the 
less strong on that account There is one woman whom a 
Frenchman will always respect — it is la bonne mere; one 
whom he always holds pure and above suspicion — it is his 
mother; one whom he always regards with a boyish love 
and an almost childish affection — it is la petite mere. It is 
to be confessed that he does not extend this feeling of 
sacredness to his friends' wives, and that he believes it to be 
his duty to be an unchained lion as regards paying unmis- 
takable adoration to any fine Mademoiselle or charmante 
Mees he may meet ; but his mother is always surrounded 
with a halo of reverential love. He does not, however, 
continue his adoration to one remove — he no more loves his 
mother-in-law than does an Englishman. 

A dislike so profound and so universal, extending, we 
believe, to every people except the polygamous Turks and 
Mormons, who cannot be expected at one and the same 



THE WIFE'S MOTHER, 39 

time to expend their stock of antipathy upon the mothers 
of twenty different wives — antipathy being a very valuable 
commodity if rightly used — must have some cause. It is 
very ancient ; there are traces of it in the classics ; and, 
looking over Plutarch's miscellaneous works, which we call 
his " Morals," the other day, we found him quoting a story 
to comfort a friend for a disappointment— by the way, of a 
man who was always jolly ; a kind of Greek Mark Tapley. 

He once, said Plutarch, "threw a stone at a she-dog, and 
hit his mother-in law ; whereupon he said, ^Not so bad !'" 
So, says the moralist in effect, with a grim humour, " You 
may hit something else very like what you aimed at, and it 
will be not so bad for you ! '' Why, in those days, when 
there were no tea-caddies, when brandy-bottles did not exist, 
and when no best seat by a sea-coal fire was reserved for 
the " poor old lady," Plutarch should have told this wicked 
story, one can hardly say. 

Another complaint anent mothers-in-law may be that 
fathers-in-law are exempt from the hatred that generally 
accompanies the former and clings to them like the shirt 
of Nessus. The reason is not far to seek. The father who 
has got his daughter married congratulates himself that he 
has settled her for life, and that he is rid of a somewhat 
expensive burden. As, for the most part, she has seldom 
been his companion, he cares little about her company. As 
he is a conscientious man, and has been a good husband, 



40 THE BETTER SELF. 

he IS content to believe that the husband his daughter has 
chosen will be as good, and he troubles himself no further. 

Few fathers have that intense and enduring affection for 
their daughters that was exhibited by the great-hearted 
Oliver Cromwell, who showed almost the care and tender- 
ness of a mother towards his daughter, Lady Claypole. 
There are few more touching, or more teaching, letters 
extant than those of the tender-minded Oliver — stern 
enough when his duty to his country or his God demanded 
it — to this sweet lady, who returned his love with a peculiar 
and pure devotion — which was shared, by the way, by his 
wife and mother, and all the women who knew the Protector 
intimately. It is a devotion which does him who excited 
and those w^ho felt it equal honour, and which should go far 
to thrust aside the unworthy and unphilosophical prejudice 
with which too many partisans regard the great man. But, 
as we have said, the ordinary father is accustomed '^ to wash 
his hands" of his married daughter as quickly as convenient. 
He has to ^^ look after the boys," and after the main branch 
of the family. It is in the course of nature — nature as 
moulded and taught by society — that the girls of a house 
should be regarded rather as temporary allies of it than as 
an integral part. ! They come and go, but men go on for 
ever. , The former leave th^eir father and luotlier, and cleave 
unto their husbands ;^an(l for the "most part they do this 
very thoroughly and willingly. Girls who marry enter at 



THE WIFE'S MOTHER. 41 

once into the familiar stones and feelings of the family of 
their alliance — indeed, cross-grained cynics assert that they 
will know more of the secrets of a house in a month than 
a man who marries into a family will in a dozen years. 
They take a pride in becoming one of the new people, and, 
out of love for that to which they are allied, forget the blood 
that they came of By the son-in-law the father-in-law is 
regarded as an ally and a friend, but never as an intruder. 
He is looked upon as one who will help, rather than as one 
who may demand help. He is never so troublesomely 
intimate as the mother, and, as a rule, although much more 
distant, shows a more genial and polite appreciation of his 
daughter's husband. 

But the mother, having been from the necessity of things 
much more a companion of the daughter, does not take the 
separation so calmly. It is a more serious matter to her. 
Very frequently it must be a terrible wrench, a dislocation 
of one of the purest and most beautiful friendships between 
two persons that the world can witness ; and this must be 
more especially felt in days of warm home-feelings. " He 
who has to fill a pond," said Lord Bacon, in one of his 
essays wherein acute thought is illustrated by homely sayings, 
^* can scarcely water the road ; " and we cannot scatter our 
affections broadcast if we reserve so much of them for 
home. A lady who has been harsh with her servants and 
cantankerous and cynical with her neighbours, who has 



42 THE BETTER SELF. 

forgotten the poor, and ignored the public questions of the 

day, will often be found to have centred her affections on 

her daughter with an intensity which bears some ratio to its 

narrowness. It may be very small in. width, but it is deep 

and strong. She will not "beteem the winds of -heaven visit 

her" daughter's "face too roughly." How then must she 

look upon the behaviour of a husband whose ways are not 

as her ways, and who may have been reared in a family with 

notions entirely distinct from her own, if not antagonistic 

/to them? (The sweet calm of a well-ordered home may be 

/ succeeded by the careless negligence of one not accus- 

l tomed to order ; ]and women, naturally conservative, because 

/^naturally more cautious and timid, rebel if " my daughter, 

V poor child," has not everything that she has been used to, 

/ and are full of fears for the future and distrust for the 

\ present. Moreover, either from a forgetfulness of the past, 

or from that narrow view which grows at home and is not 

corrected by going out into the world, '^mother-in-law" 

seldom gives her daughter credit for an absorbing love 

which will make these odds all equals, which makes little 

sacrifices very pleasant, and vrhich turns the edge of even 

serious troubles and greater trials. "Good gracious, my 

dear, how can you wear that stuff gown ! " says one old lady : 

" What, marry and give up at-homes and receptions ! " cries 

another, little thinking that such gaieties were as little to be 

regarded in comparison with an absorbing love as an extra 



THE WIFE'S MOTHER. 43 

stripe of paint on the cheek of a South-Sea Island belle, 
or a second nose-ring in the cartilage of a South African 
beauty. 

In trying to account for what we hold a foolish prejudice 
— for a wise young couple may generally make mother-in-law 
a good friend and a close ally — we must not forget that there 
are bad and injudicious old persons who deserve very much 
what has been so widely said against the class, and who 
render- many a home the scene of the most irritating dis- 
comfort. • The mother-in-law, say the ill-natured ones, has, 
about the time that her daughters marry, got tired of her own 
home and her husband, and is somewhat eager for a little 
proper and exciting dissipation. She therefore takes upon 
herself to visit Angelina and Edwin just as the two are 
getting used to each other, and the stronger or at least 
more forcible man is settling the new house into its future 
scale of order, such as it may be. And after a while this 
new relation, at first welcomed kindly and heartily as one 
not at all unpleasant, brings a new mind, with new views, 
taken from quite an opposite point of the compass to that 
of dear Edwin. Her feelings are at right angles to his. 
There may be — and who shall blame her, poor thing? — a 
little jealousy if she finds her daughter forgetful of her 
mother, and selfishly devoted to her husband ; or, on the 
other hand, Edwin may find that Angelina neglects him, 
and attends to her mother with a warmth of affection not 



44 THE BETTER SELF. ' 

suited to his taste. The wife is perhaps to be pitied ; for, 
if it be hard to serve two masters, how difficult must it be to 
serve a master and a mistress at the same time ! ( Love is 
tyrannical — naj^, he is an ex^qlusive despot. If a man loves 
his wife with devotion, he will naturally claim the same 
devotion; and the third party — especially of such weight as 
is the mother-in-law — becomes a terrible interloper. 

But there comes a time at which this third party makes 
herself felt in a manner which selfish man seldom forgets. 
The baby-world is woman's province, and mother-in-law 
rushes to the rescue of the daughter and to the control 
of the house when baby comes. Into these mysteries it is 
supposed that a man is not able to penetrate. He is as 
much out of place as Clodius was when, dressed in woman's 
apparel, he assisted at the worship of the Bona Dea. The 
husband is put on one side as a useless person ; and even 
- h e doctor, who may be supposed to have ideas twenty years 
more modern than mother-in-law, is looked pn coldly. An 
elderly woman generally believes that the juniors of her own 
sex have not the least idea how things should be done ; and 
mother-in-law, with the best intentions in the world, is apt 
to be tyrannical. When baby grows up, the collisions 
between modern and ancient practice become more fre- 
quent, and the presence of a third party in the house is 
felt to be more irksome than ever. The wife naturally looks 
up to the mother's riper experience, and the husband, ii 



THE WIFE'S MOTHER, 45 

^he meddles unwisely, finds that his mother-in-law is elevated 
to the position of a judge — and not only a judge, but a 

^partisan into the bargain. Amongst many good qualities 
which women have, that of being impartial is not one ; and 
differences, small in themselves, become, when aggravated, 
the fertile sources of quarrel. It is not pleasant for a 
husband to have a court of appeal in his own house ; and, 
while it may be very nice for the wife to have some one 
with whom she can debate the faults of her partner for life, 
it will be wise if she relies upon her own sense, and, as soon 
as possible, cuts away the feeling of subordination which she 
naturally owes to her mother. Very serious quarrels — and 
quarrels are perhaps the most useless of troubles — could be 1 
avoided by a little management. 

The mother-in-law is, we think, on the whole, much 
more sinned against than sinning. Good-nature is mis- 
construed into officiousness, tender affection and generosity 
into wheedling and bribery, and the love of watching over 
the happiness of a being she loves into a mean and spying 
curiosity. She pleases neither master nor servants, and, in 
her endeavours to help, often seriously offends the mistress 
of the house. If she is wise she will rest content with 
letting the young couple alone, and aiding her daughter at a 
distance. The whole of the argument may be summed up 
in the words of an old saying, so significant to husband and 
wife — significant, but indicative of the selfishness of posses- 



46 THE BETTER SELF. 

sion — that "Two is company, and three is none." Husband 
and wife desire each other's company and cosy chat alone : 
mother-in-law is in the way with old or young couples ; and 
it will require some considerable cultivation of the better 
self always to welcome the Wife's Mother, in spite of the 
miserable staleness of the jokes against hei; 



( 47 ) 



V. 

OUR OWN FLESH AND BLOOD. 

Of all heartless modem sayings, many of them to be traced 
to the foolish, inane, empty farces, and other mad and silly 
comic literature of the day, of which we have so large a 
superabundance, that which insults our relatives is the worst. 
" Relative " itself is a poor, weak noun, formed in an 
illegitimate manner; for to be cousin and of the same stock, 
generation, and blood with a man, be he a king or a com- 
moner, is easily understood ; but to be merely related, 
brought back to some connection with him, is but a thin 
term. 

Some of us seem apt to insult these " connections ^ with 
the coldest of words, since we read of them such base libels, 
which some wiseacre puts forward, as this — " Relations are 
people who imagine they have a claim to insult you if poor, 
and to rob you if rich '' — a pleasant alternative surely. A 
poor relation is something worse. " He is," says Lamb (to 
some it may be necessary to remark that this good-hearted 
and lovable essayist proved by his life that the article 



48 THE BETTER SELF. 

quoted was written in deep satire), " a piece of impertinent 
correspondency — an odious approximation — a haunting con- 
science — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon- 
tide of your prosperity — an unwelcome remembrancer — a 
perpetually recurring mortification — a drain on your purse — 
a more intolerable dun on your pride — a drawback upon 
success — a rebuke to your rising — a stain in your blood — a 
blot on your 'scutcheon — a rent in your garment — a death's 
head at your banquet — Agathocles's pot — a Mordecai in 
your gate — a Lazarus at your door — a lion in your path — 
a frog in your chamber — a fly in your ointment — a mote in 
your eye — a triumph to your enemy — an apology to your 
friends — the one thing not needful — the hail in harvest — 
the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet." 

Poo7^ relations indeed must those be of whom one could 
write and feel in earnest like this. Happily it is hard to 
believe that any one does so. The great evils of any 
"relation" are two ; one, that he is rich, and the other that 
he is poor; but truly the gold sword cuts asunder more 
than the ragged saw of poverty, and one can readily believe 
that there are more quarrels with rich relations than with 
poor ones. Poverty is a great trial, not only to those who 
suffer, but to those who stand by and look on. When a 
man is prosperous he ver)^ foolishly, but very naturally, takes 
all the merit to himself, and he looks down upon his brother 
in the dust with some contempt. " If Jack," he says, " had 



OUR OWN FLESH AND BLOOD. 49 

only made an effort — if he had only energy, what would he 
not have done ! Now, just look at me." He forgets that the 
lucky men are often lucky by accident, and that success 
does not always crown and accompany industry. Moreover, 
a want of due recognition and reward will beat down very 
stout hearts ; and the long, long toiling and waiting crush 
the hopes out of many good and bold men, who contentedly, 
or at least quietly, give up the game, and let the tide of life 
flow past them without trying to catch many fish. While 
the rich man looks down, it may be, or his wife looks down, 
upon the poor relation, the latter, on his part, feels ill at 
ease in visiting his too rich brother. *^I can't stand the 
expensive dinners, the wine, and the servants," says the 
poor wife, as she draws comparisons between her own 
humble menage and 7nhitc and the more abundantly provided 
house and table of her sister-in-law. Say what we may 
about poor relations, in nine cases out of ten it is the pride 
of the poor man that first takes hurt ; and it is the poor man 
who wings his way from the rich one, and leaves him to 
mourn, more frequently than we give him credit for, for 
the loss of his relation. Cloth of gold will hardly match 
with cloth of frieze. It is the old stoiy over again. A great 
wit, who is now dead, said of the divisions which pride 
makes amongst us, that wholesale looks down on retail, and 
that the man who sells a rasher of bacon is despised by the 
dealer in whole hogs, although they are of the same trade. 

E 



50 THE BETTER SELF. 

Pride is, of course, the great agent of separation in all cases; 
but one need not be unfair to the well-to-do and the suc- 
cessful. In relationship, poor pride is quite as aggressive 
as rich pride, and very often commences the action. 

Still, the family is the great bond of unity. It is through 
it that we advance to the fact that there is another and 
larger family. It is in it that we must cultivate the better- 
self When we can feel that all flesh and blood are of one 
family — a great, divine, and powerful family, but one which 
has yet its skeleton cupboard — we shall have advanced 
more than one step towards a better kind of civilization. It 
is, perhaps, necessary for action, difference, and mental 
employment, that the separation of small knots of men 
should take place ; for if the simply selfish family idea were 
acted upon by any great race— such as the Bourbon or 
Napoleonic race, as especial examples — it might not be 
quite so well for the rest of the world. The patriarchal 
feeling, where a whole family looks up with reverence to one 
head, enters largely into religion ; and, symbolically as well 
as really, this reverence bids us call God, the Creator, our 
Father, and regard mankind as our brothers and sisters. 
This is the general and noble view of the family. That 
more selfish and ambitious view entertained in policy and 
trade, that of the Bourbons, Napoleons, and Rothschilds, 
is more rare, and when found, either in the great world or 
the little world, is a very great engine of success. Great 



OUR OWN FLESH AND BLOOD, 51 

families, by a wise combination, have ruled the world, and, 
without especial talents, have, by being selfishly true to them- 
selves, remained firmly fixed in the world's estimation long 
after the blessings of Providence and the gift of the genius 
of administration have left them. They have illustrated the 
wisdom of holding together, and the fable of the old man, 
who, before he died, showed his sons a bundle of sticks, 
and proved to them how strong numbers could be when 
bound together, and how weak we all are when single. 
And all through life we see this exhibited. Every now and 
then there is a family that is true to itself The uncles help 
the nephews, the brothers stick together ; when one wants a 
lift, a cousin is ready to give it. Of course, it needs not any 
great v.isdom to predict the success of such a family. The 
world may cry out upon it if it likes; but it is a deal stronger 
than the world, and it makes its way through it. It has the 
elements of success in it — good-fellowship, calm wisdom, 
mutual forbearance, knowledge of self; for all these are 
required to make the sacrifices necessary to keep up the 
family tie. 

The success which attends such a family arrangement 
carries with it the seeds of discord. ( Many can help one, 
says the old proverb, but one cannot help many ;\ yet he 
can, .and with a true family a kind of mutual benefit society 
is established, in which one helps many, and many can help 
one. Look at the clannishness of the Scots, and the way in 



52 277^ BETTER SELF. 

which mere kinship is looked on as a sacred claim. Mark 
their unity abroad, and its accompanying success. The basis 
of such is simply the real, earnest, and honest feeling of 
cousinship. So we may grant at once any amount of 
material power to a family wise enough to be true to itself, 
and to persist in keeping up family ties. 

Amongst some people such bonds are much more pre- 
valent than others. At the two extremes of civilization, the 
-very rude and the very polished people do not care much 
for their relations. A brutal Bosjesman would just as soon 
kill and 'hurt his third cousin as any one else in the tribe; 
and that furious Negro Sultan, the King of Dahomey, who 
illustrates the native sweetness of the Negro by slaying his 
three hundred victims a year, so that he may float his canoe 
in what Miss Wackford Squeers calls "human goar," pro- 
bably slays a great many of his blood-relations. It does 
not matter to him whether a wife's nephew or brother is 
among the crowd. But these savages are better off than 
the civilized savage in this — the tie of the tribe, which is, 
after all, but another and larger name for the family, serves 
his stead. After seeking to propitiate his vengeful and 
hellish deity by this human slaughter, in which his subjects 
participate and agree, the Dahomian Sultan marches his 
Amazons against another tribe, and with much joy, revel, and 
applause, slays them or catches them for the slave-dealers, 
from whom, if indeed they would go quietly, they get the 



OUR OWN FLESH AND BLOOD. 53 

only benefit in the life of such savages — an exportation into 
Christianity and civilization of some sort. And each tribe 
that fights another for the ultimate honour of cultivating the 
white man's sugar and tobacco, fights under its family tie. 
The honour of the tribe is felt in those dusky bosoms in 
some way; so, as we proceed, this honour grows more 
tender and sensitive, and under badges and cognizances 
the simple family grows into the great house. 

Amongst Celtic nations, and chiefly with the Irish 
and Highland Scots (for the Lowlanders are of a very 
different race), the claims of the family tie have remained 
in full force ; and ^a Scotsman will tell you what an 
Englishman never can, namely, who is his cousin by a 
sixth or seventh remove. J Banded thus together, society 
in Scotland and in Ireland naturally fell into a number of 
circles. Chieftains and heads of septs, or families, came to 
be the rule. There was the O'Connor Don, the O'Neil, the 
O'Donoghue, the O'Sullivan, each the head of a family ; and 
in the Highlands the same family rule produced the same 
result. Whether this was good as a whole we may doubt. 
The poor fellow who was filius nullms, the son of nobody, 
came in for nobody's share. But then there never was such 
a person. Everybody was related to everybody else. The 
Irish peasant who lived in contented idleness and poverty 
upon the estate of his lordship, had the proud cAisciousness 
of being some thirty-second cousin to the man whose dogs 



54 THE BETTER SELF. 

he fed with, and whose horses he ran after. You will see 
this spirit — a loyal and beautiful spirit in its way — often 
illustrated in the old Irish and Scotch songs. In the 
" Groves of Blarney " we are told — 

*^ There was Mars, and Vanus, and Nicodamus, 
Sure with beauty none can wid them compare ; 
There was Jul'yus Caesar and Nebuchad'nazar, 
All standmg mother-naked in the open air ! " 

And these statues the poet evidently mistakes for some of 
the family, for he adds, they were — 

** All blood relations to my Lord Donoughmore." 

At funerals and births, marriages and deaths, these family- 
ties came out strongly. Second sight and the banshee, a 
certain kind of private prophecy and a private ghost, 
belonged to the great family; but the poor man had his 
share in them. 

But these now live no longer in the faith of reason. 
These opposing circles everywhere did little good to the 
nation. The love which was abundant in the family was 
cold and thin out of it. t^lood was thicker than waterTS 
said such people ; and all out of the family was regarded 
as so much dirty ditch-water. So the circles or septs, like 
separate globules of quicksilver which are separated by 
dust, never ran together; and what made the strength of 
the individual chieftain was the weakness of the nation. 



OUR OWN FLESH AND BLOOD. 55 

Although there is much that is romantic in those old 
times, when family love was strong, and family hate made 
a perfect vendetta if any of the Joneses injured any of the 
Smiths, when there was common cause in a family if any 
one was injured, without too strictly inquiring into the 
justice of the case, it became a necessity, as civilization 
advanced, that ties of this sort should end. As nation 
after nation emerged into the light of Christian civilization, 
it found justice and charity — that is, universal affection — 
far above individual fondness. Because Jones was the head 
of our family, we had no call to wink at his sins, to put up 
wdth his enormities, and to pour all our favours into the 
pockets of Jones. Our duty was to be just to all men, and 
to love Brown, who was a good man, but not our own, as 
well as Jones, who was not a good man, but our own. 
Gradually, as the dust fell off, these little globules of quick- 
silver began to form a solid and compact mass, and to 
merge into each other. The influence of universal learning, 
of a religion which was as catholic as the sun which shone, 
and the atmosphere which transmitted and diffused its light, 
melted away the differences of man. It was found that not 
only to one especial family had God spoken, but to all the 
world — to the Jew first, and afterwards to the Gentile ; that 
He was no respecter of persons, and that He lighteneth 
every man that cometh into the world with a human heart 
susceptible of human love. 



S6 THE BETTER SELF. 

So the little families break up into one great family, and 
the sept into universal brotherhood. We are all brothers 
and sisters from Adam; and in the second Adam justice 
supersedes favour. We cannot do more than is right ; and 
if we are right and true to all men, all men will be our 
brothers. If we only knew this properly, all wars, all evils, 
all local miseries and want would be regarded as sore evils 
in the family of m^n ; and all men who tried to draw others 
together, and to make men better than they are, would be 
regarded as the true heroes ; not those who thunder out 
dissension, and who slay others. And yet the man of peace 
is rarely honoured. Lawyers and soldiers make our peers, 
and are clothed with the robe and the coronet. The truth 
is, we are still far from the magic circle of the universal 
family. 

Therefore, until we enter that, we had better perhaps 
cherish the relations we have. We can hardly extend^ love 
to them without some bettering of ourselves. The critical 
and sceptical spirit which has of late years been so preva- 
lent, and which some people, generally very young men, 
think so clever, has done much to separate us from family 
ties, without making us love mankind a whit the better. We 
are told in a hundred ways that country cousins are bores, 
rude, uncultivated, and that uncles are only fit to be looked 
to for the purpose of getting money from. Everywhere 
there is a sad rude spirit ot selfishness inculcated. Sisters 



OUR OWN FLESH AND BLOOD, S7 

are bores on the one hand, and mothers-in-law and aunts 
objectionable " old parties/' whom we are enjoined to be 
rude to and get out of the way if poor, and to cajole and 
get out of the way if rich. All this is as " snobbish " as 
it is false, and as false as it is mean and despicable. God 
only can know the patient, kindly goodness which relations, 
especially female relations, show to us — how they amuse us 
when babies, or when sick ; how they shield our faults and 
magnify our virtues j how they believe in us when no one 
else does, watch the rising genius, cherish our first scrap 
of poetry or ^\Tetched sketch, and stick to us at the last 
when others desert us. Blood is, after all, in its best sense, 
thicker than water, often sharing our hereditary idiosyn- 
cracies. In good truth there are no people in the world 
who can so fully and truly appreciate us, and who are, 
on the whole, so true and generous to us, as our blood 
relations. 



58 THE BETTER SELF. 



VI. 

FEELING FOR OTHERS. 

It is astonishing how much even the most selfish people 
like others to feel for them, little as they may feel for others. 
Mr. Greville tells us in his memoirs that George IV., than 
whom "a more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling 
dog does not exist," yet was fond of being pitied, and 
was never so much hurt as by some caricature of his wig 
or his whiskers. Perhaps the wonder is that with the persons 
around him he had any feeling at all. The way to make 
a man know and despise mankind, is, they say, to make 
him a Prime Minister. What must he feel, then, if a 
King? 

Happily there are so many millions of us without that 
trial — but for king or beggar sympathy is equally needful. 
The word is hardly so homely as we should like, since a 
Greek derivative poorly expresses an English word, because 
to nine-tenths of our people it must be a mere sign, a 
shibboleth which some thoroughly understand, and some 
but lamely. For we, who have been accustomed to address 



FEELING FOR OTHERS. 59 

the old as well as the young, so well know the plain, 
honest, sufficient, but by no means brilliant English intel- 
lect, that, with all love and honour, we hold it to be but 
affectation to use fine words, and words difficult of com- 
prehension to the many, if we would be understood by 
the many. Even so common a word may mislead and 
confuse such of our readers as think that it means some- 
thing better or more than our compound word ^^fellow- 
feeling." And yet it implies nothing^ more than a feeling 
together with another, a kind of Christian endeavour to 
comprehend the trials, the temptations, the difficulties of 
another — a kind of " put-yourself-in-his-place " attempt of a 
good man towards his fellow-creatures. 

In Shakspere we meet with manifold illustrations of this 
all-embracing human bond — happy thoughts clothed in the 
most lucid expression which that transcendent genius gave 
us out of his abundant wealth. And his wealth was, after 
all, what ? In what did his knowledge, his greatness, and 
his goodness consist? What makes his wisdom? Why 
should you and I, and the poor weak clerk in prison, who 
has forged and fallen, and that stately preacher, who 
upholds himself and many others, all choose to sit to Shaks- 
pere's book ? Why should all bow to him, all intellects feel 
below his ? Why was he thus great ? Because of his sym- 
pathy. It was he who had that wondrous fellow-feeling that 
made him paint a villain so that an angel might pity and 



6o THE BETTER SELF. 

even love him; and bade us pity and feel for the worm in 
the bud, or the corporal sufferance of the poor beetle that 
we tread upon. 

Perhaps there is no power in the world which is not 
wholly of the world that rs so magical in its effects as 
sympathy; and it is something which should call for our 
especial study as regards our faith that that is based not only 
upon a suggestion of this feeling, but upon its absolute and 
unconditional demand. To be good Christians we must 
love our fellow-man, we must feel with him, enter into his 
trials — rejoice with them who rejoice, and weep with them 
who weep. And He who showed the most abundant 
fellow-feeling, who wept with the sisters that mourned a 
brother, and felt even for the sinner and the outcast, puts 
it to us plainly that a want of true sympathy is an absolute 
negation of any power of true worship, or of any approach 
to God. If a man loveth not his brother whom he hath 
seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? Look 
down into the deep profound which these v/ords reveal, 
and mark thence how true godUness, the humble approach 
of man to Heaven, depends upon our love for those on 
earth. 

Mark, too, how the noblest books and the divinest 
prayers depend for their lasting powers upon the sympathy 
they show. Why do we so often turn in trouble and in 
sorrow to the Psalms of David, and to the history of grief. 



FEELING FOR OTHERS. 6i 

but that the heart yearns for sympathy, and finds its truest 
expression therein ? Books may amuse, and may make us 
laugh when we are well — may make us sneer pleasantly 
at the ignorant and untaught, and think it exceedingly 
vulgar in a young lady not to sit her horse well, or to be 
able to talk about the Opera or the State concert ; they 
may tickle our vanity, please our mental palates, beguile 
our thoughts, but they will live in our hearts only by their 
sympathy. 

Perhaps there never was a time when there was less 
of this precious quality shown, and surely hardly any time 
when it was more needed, than the present. Class is 
arrayed against class by a long series of strikes, and the 
consequences of these strikes have hardened the hearts of 
the vast middle class against both the very rich and the 
very poor. It is a trial of our faith, brought about by this 
Social-Political science of which we are so proud. It is 
hard for any one of us who are struggling in life, as most 
of us do struggle, to regard with a tender feeling men who 
parade their rights, and by the power of trade combination 
make each pound in our pockets worth only fifteen shillings. 
That is an argument to the purse which we can all under- 
stand. And yet the working classes have a right to, nay, 
a necessity for, combining, although, as we long ago pointed 
out — nearly fifteen years ago in fact — such a right does 
not and cannot really better their condition \ for it is 



62 THE BETTER SELF. 

simply ridiculous to suppose that the position of the 
working classes is actually improved. They get more 
shillings, but the shillings buy less. The currency has 
depreciated ; the men are much as they were. Individual 
men may and do rise, but so they did, and with infinitely 
more alacrity, forty years ago. 

It is precisely because of this difficulty that we should 
sympathize with these blind endeavours after something 
nobler and better. These aspirants are not all wrong; 
they wish to struggle into purer air ; they feel for their 
wives and children ; they are men like ourselves, and 
many of them better men than we are. Let us put our- 
selves in their place; were we there, we perhaps might 
do as they. But, above all, do not let us harden them by 
want of sympathy ; not for the dread of the threats oi any 
turbid demagogue, which are as empty as a soap bubble — 
not for the sake of ourselves, were these threats likely to 
be enforced — but for the dear sakes of these our brothers — 
for the sake of our common God, the All-Father, as the 
Scandinavians well called Him, who will not that we should 
harden our hearts and break those of our brothers ; and 
especially for the sake of our true faith. For it is by 
sympathy as much as by anything in the world that we 
shall make men believe in God. To form a parallel to our 
Lord's words. If ye believe not in man whom ye have 
seen, how can ye believe in God whom ye have not seen? 



FEELING FOR OTHERS. 63 

God, in a worldly sense, is so far off, and man so near. 
*' In how many cases,'' says an excellent writer, " does 
the belief in God depend, in its energy and reality, and to 
some extent rightly, on the actions of men?" Do we 
think of this in our daily hard-hearted doings, our buying 
in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market? Go, 
build churches, thou man of wealth, whose eagerness to get 
that wealth has driven many a fellow-creature to despair. 
Ten thousand sermons preached by eloquent divines will 
not undo half the evil of the acted sermon of your life ! 

Think of this. Think and know — for you know that it 
is true — that the minds of sufferers may be and are thrown 
into despair, and into denial of all good, into doubt of 
God, and into Atheism, by neglect. "Such," says the 
Avriter we quote, thanking him for his good teaching in the 
best way, by making it more public — " such states of mind 
are natural because every sign of human love is a witness 
to Divine love, and every want of human love a failure in 
that witness. Every man who resists a genuine impulse 
of pity makes himself to that extent a non-conductor of the 
pity which God has put into his heart, and robs some one 
else of a revelation, as well as himself of the blessing 0/ 
transmitting it. There is no greater trial of faith than 
human neglect and physical suffering together. Almost 
any one who stifles a real impulse of genuine pity may be 
making an Atheist, or clouding the faith of a Christian." 



64 THE BETTER SELF. 

These are weighty words, and none the less so because 
it may be thought that they would hardly be needed in a 
land which seems to overflow with pity, and where hospitals 
and organized charities abound so fully. But it is not to 
those that we apply the word " sympathy." Alas ! of all 
the thousands of patients that enter the splendid hospitals 
of London, are there ten who think of their pious founders, 
or of the sympathy which, by a pen-stroke in a will, gave ten 
thousand pounds to a charity, and left some angry heir so 
much the poorer ? Such a deed, if it really arises from true 
sympathy, is beautiful, and the donors may gather the 
thanks in heaven that they miss on earth. But we speak of 
living sympathy : a pennyworth of such tme love is worth a 
pound's worth of relief doled out at an hospital, to which 
the recipients somehow think they have a right, ^and which 
too often ministers to their bodies without touching their 
hearts. 

All of us demand sympathy ; and they who pretend to 
want it not are foolish in their transparently hypocritical 
cynicism. We desire it when we are young, we demand 
the love and admiration of our fellows, we ask even from 
our baby companions the ready ear and the readier laugh 
when we are grieved or we triumph. The child— a stranger 
in the world — looking up to its father as the oldest inhabi- 
tant, and to those around it as accustomed to the world and 
its ways, demands guidance, aid, help, love ; but, above all, 



FEELING FOR OTHERS. 65 

it asks of us to enter into its joys and its ovrn little views of 
men and things, and to understand what it means. The 
true way of managing children is to feel with them, to know 
their hearts and take their view. Unless we do so, our 
hearts will remain strangers to theirs. And children are at 
once tyrannical and sceptical w^ith their elders ; they know 
clearly who cares for them, who can enter into their feelings 
about the dog and the cat and dolly, and the inhabitants 
of that true Utopia, a child's world. '' Oh, I say," cried a 
philosopher of five to an elder philosopher of fifty, who 
had been answering at random, " do get away — you know 
nothing about it !" As for dogs and dumb animals, which 
require sympathy almost as much as any of us, their instinct 
that way is really marvellous. 

A puppy which follows shambling after half-a-dozen 
gutter children, and enjoys their play as much as they do, 
will attach himself to the most sympathetic, and infallibly 
pick out the best-natured child. The dog of one habitually 
engaged will know when he is busy, and will find out the 
most appropriate time to bring him his ball or his bundle 
of rags to play with ; the sporting dog knows the temper ot 
the keeper j and the dog of Mr. William Sikes studied with 
a hidden sympathy the feelings of that atrocious scoundrel 
And in return animals understand and are grateful to our 
human feeling for their troubles and diseases. All nature 
has some hidden source of fellowship ; she, as Wordsworth 

F 



66 THE BETTER SELF. 

says, " never did betray the heart that worshipped her;" and 
we feel this so strongly that we own that we are not disposed 
to laugh at that quaint suggestion of Father Noyes and his 
fellow-worshippers in America, that the very apple-trees in 
the orchards know when they are tended and praised and 
cared for. Many an '^ old Adam-gardener " in the country 
will tell us how his flowers, nursed and tended by his hand, 
will seem, at least to him, to lift their heads and blow 
abundantly and gratefully towards him who knows their 
habits, and has sought to understand something of their 
hidden source of life. 

But these are extreme instances. Of this we are sure, 
that sentient nature demands all sympathy. And it is 
essentially necessary at home. There^ at least, is an unusual 
demand for it. The father or mother who withholds it 
from children is short-sighted and unwise. Foolish and 
evanescent their griefs may be, but they are not less real. 
Rather are they the more poignant, since in this life the vain 
shows of things dominate over the .realities. Hence the 
more reason that a ready sympathy should explain them, 
and that we who are accustomed to life should lift the veil 
and strip the mask from the idol which terrifies the child. 
Enter into your son's feelings, and speak peace to your 
daughter's heart. Be something more than the head of your 
family and a severe judge. There is no revolution but that 
within your own heart that will lay low the despotism of a 



FEELING FOR OTHERS. 67 

parent and make it into the limited monarchy of a father 
and a friend. Nor, as the child grows up, will it need less 
wise counsel and true sympathy. Half the quarrels between 
husband and wife, no less than between father and son, 
mother and daughter, arise from the withholding of this 
precious peace-maker, this wise counsellor, which springs 
from a gentle and an understanding heart, " He did not 
feel with me — he did not understand me. He never tried 
to put himself in my place." How often are these words 
uttered sadly and bitterly ! Nor, as we go on in life, do we 
need sympathy less. We must seek for love and apprecia- 
tion in our brothers' hearts. If they seek not to understand 
us, how shall nobler and more distant beings do so ? In thai 
struggle of life, the hero and the coward, the conqueror and 
the conquered, need sympathy equally. Let the wife espe- 
cially erect herself above the mere plaything of a youthful 
affection, demanding continual courtship, and with interest 
enter into her husband's pursuits, and sympathize with his 
many trials, which no man is free from. \J[t is in the struggle 
of life, which frets and worries, insensibly wearing away our 
better feelings — in the disappointments of legitimate aims, in 
the gathering weakness of resolve and hope and faith which 
years bring with them, in the daily obhteration of some noble 
resolve — that man's trials lie. The best of us often doubts, 
and no doubt often hates himself, gives way to despondency, 
and becomes a prey to melancholy. The strongest of us 



68 THE BETTER SELF, 

needs some support, some good word in season which shall 
cheer us on the way, and the wise woman will be ready to 
give as well as to receive sympathy. There are wives, un- 
fortunately, who put down every trouble to a man's own 
fault, and to whose stony bosoms one might as well apply 
for sympathy as for warmth to an iceberg. And let us 
remember that perhaps there is no one who needs it more 
than the upright, good man, who walks on the straight path, 
every now and then parting from friends whom he loves, 
and who knows as only he can know how much the struggle 
has cost, and what secret wounds are dealt him in the battle 
of life. Often the mind that upholds others needs itself 
to be upheld ; the wise adviser himself needs advice ; the 
honest heart that seems so true and bold is fainting from 
some secret sorrow, dying from some little wound which 
sympathy could stanch. Withhold not such fellow-feeling ; 
for in giving it you at least carry out the behests of that 
newest human faith, "the religion of humanity," and in 
giving it you may be advancing a step farther eveo into the 
confines of the religion of God. 



( 69 ; 



VII. 

FRIENDS AND NO FRIENDS. 

But we should be careful from whom we seek sympathy if 
we cultivate the better-self. 

It would, perhaps, be considered cynical to say that not 
one man in a hundred is calculated to be a friend, and that 
not one in a thousand is now-a-days educated for that im- 
portant, noble, and ennobling office ; but nevertheless it is 
true. The public, which is represented as not liking the 
truth, and which before now has broken the windows of 
those who told it unpleasant truths, still affects to believe in 
friends and friendships, but all the while is hugging itself 
with self-help, and caring little about helping others out- 
side of self. " Make your own little game ! " it cries. " Let 
coal-merchants combine, for the sake of making money a 
little faster, and starve a few hundreds of the poor; let the 
nation pull down the Church that has ennobled and raised 
it, that has built schools throughout the kingdom, and given 
the poor what education they have — kick it out and forget 



70 THE BETTER SELF. 

its services — have a scramble — one may get a ^ big lump.' 
Never reward merit — :it is troublesome to do so ; raise your 
rich tradesmen and city aldermen to dignities, and let their 
sons reign over your sons, so as to make the very title of 
knight contemptible ; regard a man only because of his 
money qualifications, and the nice ' place ' he has in the 
country; make money your chief god; do not help a friend 
when he is poor — drop him ; know a man when he is rick 
and flatter him ; do not invite your relations to your feasts, 
but only those from whom you expect something; make 
every one you know of some use to you." 

Such is the new (or old) patent social utilitarianism, the 
bastard product of the greatest-happiness-of-the-greatest- 
number principle. To a reflective man the phrase condemns 
itself A very little worldly knowledge will tell us that the 
greatest number are savages. Certainly the only persons 
who ought to rule — Christians, because they are bound to, 
and really do in a measure, consult the happiness of others 
— are in a woeful minority. But, even in this country, if the 
bookish philosophers confine us to it, fools are in the 
majority; the Secular Society and the Sunday Distinction 
Society, and Mr. Dodger and the Deliberation Society, 
would concede this. Are we then to place the happiness 
of the whole in the hands of fools — or are fools the fit 
governors for wise men ? What about lunatics and eccen- 
tric persons ? How is the majority to be made up, and how 



FRIENDS AND NO FRIENDS. 71 

is happiness to be defined ? Who has decided what it is ? 
Bentham, whose portrait has as comical a screw on its 
mouth as that of Rabelais himself, must have heartily enjoyed 
the intensely roguish humour of proposing this miserable 
Will-o'-the-Wisp to lead the crowd into the mire. A school- 
boy's paper-chase is a gloriously intellectual pursuit com- 
pared to such a harem-scarem piece of humbug. How can 
we expect to find true friendship amongst the utilitarians ? 
For a friend is a costly product, and requires a good 
expenditure of feeling. Hence the satirically candid parson 
who told his congregation that he could fill his church three 
times over with his acquaintances, but that the pulpit would 
suffice to contain all his friends, was not far wrong. Eng- 
land, hastening forward on her selfish patent principles, 
guided by the philosophy of one who confesses that he was 
at twenty-one a mere ^^book in breeches," must prepare 
herself for a fatal Ramoth-Gilead, unless she suffers her heart 
and her conscience to speak out. 

But, as in extreme northern climates, where there is but 
little sun, or rather, where the slanting rays touch without 
warming and have little power, there is found a parhelion, 
or mock sun, which at times enrages the frozen traveller 
with its mere show of warmth and light, so the country 
which produces very few friends produces an abundant crop 
of false and foolish people, who, to ingratiate themselves 
with the public or with private persons, pretend to an 



72 THE BETTER SELF. 

immense fervour, warmth, and magnanimity, and hope 
thereby to advance their own fortunes. Such persons are 
hke the travelHng showman, spoken of in Dickens's story, 
who keeps whispering to poor Httle Nell, " Codlin's the 
friend, not Short," and take care to advertise their oa\ti 
merits in opposition to those of their rivals. There is not 
a movement at the present day upon which these foolish 
and false friends have not mounted to advertise themselves. 
There is not a holy cause that they have not bedaubed and 
contaminated — not a sacred statue upon which they have 
not stuck their names. Pupkins, the people's poet ; Pup- 
kins, the champion of the masses; Pupkins, the working 
man's defence ; Pupkins, promoter of the national society 
for providing old Tom and new scandal to distressed washer- 
women. Do not our readers know Pupkins ? Do not they 
know many of his sort ? Do they not also know Slodgers, 
the people's champion, who convenes a meeting in Hyde 
Park for the " crushed crossing-sweepers," and gets reported 
in the newspapers for gallantly defying a policeman who is 
doing his duty, and calling him a "minion of the law"? 
Does any one believe that the crushed crossing-sweepers — 
whom, as Mr. Slodgers said, " a tyrant haristocracy kep' a 
waitin' on Providence at filthy crcssin's, rather than defile 
their patent-leather boots with the mud of a free city " — 
ever benefited by their champion's conduct? Rather, is it 
not well known that the boys of London seized the vacant 



FRIENDS AND NO FRIENDS. -jz 

crossings and the golden opportunity, and pocketed the 
pennies of the crushed crossing-sweepers ? 

Slodgers and Pupkins become, by puffing, pubhc 
characters ; their names have figured on every hoarding, and, 
false and foolish and inefficient friends as they are, they reap 
the reward of such advertising. The name of Pupkins is 
known — that of Slodgers is, if not honoured, notorious. 
Small consolation is afforded in the belief that these hurtful 
blunderheads must at some time or other reap the reward 
of those who meddle and muddle — must at length " land " 
themselves in the ditch of blind guides, and be fed on the 
disappointment they have occasioned their dupes. Accom- 
panying them, let us trust, will be the Coryphaei of the 
Woman's movements — the crowd of ladies and gentlemen 
who have rubbed all the bloom of innocence from woman- 
hood by open and unseemly debate of sexual questions — 
— the persons who, for the sake of spurious popularity, have 
equally maligned man and woman, and who have planted a 
wound and opened a sore in social life which will bear 
bitter results in the next twenty years. Well may woman 
cry, ^* Save me from my friends ! " Well may she be 
ashamed of those who have led her to the very market-place 
to be exposed and contemned ! Has woman or man gained 
anything from these foolish friends except spilt ink and 
heartburnings ? 

Real friends of the public are not born every day, and 



74 THE BETTER SELF. 

do not advertise themselves on walls, or noisily proclaim 
that they are proper candidates for the School Board. 
There are others who have been at once more judicious and 
more silent 

** Not only we, the latest seed of Time, 
New men that in the flying of a wheel 
Cry down the Past — not only we, that prate 
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well "— • 

but Others whose names are unrecorded on earth, but whose 
labours will not be forgotten in heaven. As a rule, when 
we find men who often make use of a popular cry to mount 
into notice, and whose names are associated with that which 
ultimately benefits themselves only, we may legitimately 
question their motives. We would not only denounce 
Slodgers and Pupkins as hypocrites, but as useless, and 
worse than useless. No one injures a good cause more 
than a foolish friend. We have a right to weigh such self- 
constituted friends, notwithstanding their ingenious method 
of self-laudation and self-advertisement. 

Of private friendship enough almost has been written, 
were it not judicious as well as useful to furbish up and 
bring forward old truths. Every young man should, if 
possible, in early life secure a friend somevv^hat older and at 
all events wiser than and of a different character from him- 
self He should be older, because his experience will be 
able to correct the hasty judgments of youth; wiser, because 



FRIENDS AND NO FRIENDS. IS 

It IS always well to associate with superiors, not inferiors, in 
intellect ; of a different character, cooler and more stable, 
or, it may be, warmer and more enthusiastic, because thereby 
we see things from a different stand-point. 

A good friend is an almost universal want ; and the 
value of such has been so long acknowledged that Cicero, 
who is at any rate a good school-authority on the subject, 
says that friendship is the only thing upon the usefulness 
of which all the world is agreed. The chosen friend 
must of course be a good man and a generous one ; such 
only can be a lasting friend. He , must be a man of 
honour; because, if by any means the friendship should 
cease — and it can only cease by mutual faults — he will 
not turn into an adversary. The selfish old proverb, that 
w^e should treat our friends as if they might at any 
moment become enemies, is rather to be spoken of tem- 
porary allies than of real friends ; but it is true from this 
point, that w^e should always act with courtesy, repress and 
conceal our weaknesses, and stamp out our selfishness in 
the presence of friends. Remember, also, that in friend- 
ship, as in most matters of this world, it is better to give 
than to receive ; it is finer to do a noble action than to be 
its recipient or the cause of its illustration. At the same 
time we must take as well as give : that is one half of 
friendship. Addison has perhaps afforded the best defini- 
nition of friendship, in telling us that it is/ " a strong and 



l(i THE BETTER SELF. 

habitual inclination of two persons to promote the good and 
happiness of each other.'' \ 

The bon mot of the French, that " friendship is love with- 
out wings/' is one of those pretty sayings which explain why 
the oft-mooted question. Can there be a true friendship 
between man and woman ? must be answered in the negative. 

The question is more complex than it seems. The man 
and woman should be of about the same age, or else friend- 
ship deteriorates into patronage ; they must be young, since 
in old age, or even in middle age, enthusiasm is so blunted, 
and the judgment has become so critical, that all warmth 
and generosity will have simmered down into mere calcula- 
tion. These being conceded, the friendship, if between 
single persons, will ascend to love, and culminate in marriage ; 
or, if between a married and a single person, or between 
two married persons, is apt to become very suspected, and 
the man will degenerate into the " foolish friend," since his 
advocacy v/ill assuredly do more harm than good. To 
assert that women, the greater number of whom are most 
generous and self-denying, cannot feel a w^arm, enthusiastic 
friendship for a man without any approach to love — to 
insinuate that they have an ulterior motive of a selfish 
nature either known to them or but partially concealed — 
is to be guilty of that which is at once mean and false. 
' But, bearing in mind that friends must be always together, 
or very frequently so — that they must aid each other in 



FRIENDS AND NO FRIENDS. 77 

critical moments, and lay bare to each other the secrets of 
their hearts — and that friendship must always be active and 
not passive, the difficulty of what are called Platonic friend- 
ships will at once be seen. If a gentleman finds a young 
lady willing to treat with him upon that footing, he must be 
first assured that she does not intend to marry, and he him- 
self must be a celibate. It is the unhappy (or happy ?) 
condition of the sexes that friendship between them must 
precede love, and that the world will always attribute to the 
warmer attraction between the two those flattering prefer- 
ences which equally mark friendship and love. Let either 
of them be properly defined, and the extreme rarity, if not 
the impossibility, of Platonic friendships will at once be 
conceded. 

Hence, also, in this deteriorated age of ours, arises the 
difficulty of friendship between two persons ill-matched 
as to degree in rank, or social position and riches. Thus a 
duke might possibly entertain the highest respect for and 
admiration of a literary but poor toiler for his daily bread, 
but they could hardly meet in the same club, or pursue 
their avocations together. A parson might delight in the 
patriarchal simplicity of his aged clerk, but it would hardly 
do for him- — although parsons are privileged to know and be 
friendly with all sorts and conditions of men — to habitually 
take tea with him, and to enjoy the innocent chat of his 
pretty daughters. In both these cases the higher and the 



f 



78 THE BETTER SELF. 

lower friend would cease to be what they should be, and 
fall into the ranks of fool-friends. The duke would be 
voted a " cad," the poor author designated a flatterer and a 
parasite; the parson would not benefit the clerk, and the 
spinsters of the village would annihilate the character of the 
parson and the clerk's daughters. The little schoolboy who 
wrapped a fine butterfly in a flannel petticoat to keep it 
warm had friendly intentions no doubt, but in the morning 
he found that he had crushed his pretty prisoner. 

We say nothing about the friendships of women ; they 
deserve a separate chapter to themselves, if only because of 
their extreme rarity. Every girl, with her longing, loving 
heart, looks out for a girl-friend. She is her first love, her 
purest, her ideal, her best ; but she seldom meets with one 
of the right sort ; and every woman of thirty, maid or matron, 
looks back ii^Oii such friendships as having been enticing, 
promising, but as empty as the cases of the cracker bons-bons 
after a party ; she looks back with a sigh as she thinks how 
shadowy her friendships were — almost as shadowy as that of 
Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris. 

Another kind of foolish friends are those who, having no 
judgment, degenerate into flatterers. It would be both a 
long and a sad history to record — if, indeed, it could be 
recorded — how nations have been destroyed and how people 
have perished by injudicious advisers, who have made them 
first drunk with a false glory, and then hurried them to 



FRIENDS AND NO FRIENDS. 79 

destruction. We have a pregnant example every day before 
us in the present state of France, and indeed of Spain. 
The Nemesis of nations comes as assuredly to them as it 
does to men. Of how much wickedness have the foolish 
frends of Ireland been guilty? How many wild-goose 
chases has she been led into ? How often has she been 
assured that the shadow in the water was a thousand times 
better than the substantial bone that she has and holds ? 

The foolish friend of a man generally tells him a heap of 
flattering untruths, either for his own immediate benefit or 
from lack of judgment. Sometimes it is the foolish father, 
who, by indulgence and a false pride in his son, persuades 
him that he is a genius; sometimes it is the mother, who by 
self-sacrificing industry, makes the daughter lazy for life; 
more frequently it is the stupid acquaintance, who pretends 
that he has seen the world, and adds, with a bold careless- 
ness of experience and the truth, that "fast life is very 
jolly," and that it is quite possible "for a fellow with his eyes 
open " to touch pitch without being defiled, or to put one's 
hand in the fire without being burnt. Experience has the 
credit of making — ^by a supernatural power, we should think 
— fools wise ; it certainly makes them poor and sore. The 
fox who had cut off his tail, could not persuade his com- 
panions that it was convenient and the right thing to do; 
but our human tail-less foxes have plenty of dupes, who, in 
after life, and in a base and ridiculous state, lament their 



8o THE BETTER SELF. 

too-trustful belief in the assertions of foolish friends. One 
or two such will be sure to destroy all but the heartiest 
endeavour to live the life which it is high time to think 
of us all doing. Happily, one readily tires of such jays. 
Hamlet wearies of his interview with the fop Osric, though 
it lasts but five minutes. 



( Si ) 



VIIL 

ADVICE GRATIS. 

Closely allied to our foolish friends are those intimate 
acquaintances who in one's way in life proffer advice, and 
howsoever humble and retiring we may be — perhaps, indeed, 
our humility enhances the chances of our meeting with 
such — offer us not their aid but their experience. 

It is a difficult thing for a young man, who sees matters 
from a very different stand-point, not to quarrel with these 
good-natured and too candid friends ; for these advisers 
sometimes hit our faults pretty shrewdly, and have quite a 
genius for treading upon our family, hereditar}^, and tender- 
est corn. But he had better restrain himself Hamlet says 
some hard things to Polonius, but they do not hurt the 
garrulous maxim-monger, and certainly do not heighten the 
character of Hamlet. 

Everybody imagines that he is capable of giving '* no 
end," as he would say, of good advice. He firmly believes 
in being, if not a wise man himself, a wise man for the sake 
of others. He is like the famous Lord Chancellor who, in 

G 



82 THE BETTER SELF. 

his own legal affairs, made plenty of mistakes, but who never 
gave a wrong judgment, and whose only way of securing 
wisdom for himself from himself was to pay into one hand a 
fee, which forthwith pocketed it. Then he was sure to be 
right — ^he had taken advice. So our general adviser will admit 
mistakes in his own actions, but, in the matter of advice, 
he is " as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina." 

This sort of belief, inherent in man, and of course in 
woman, breaks out early. We have our boy-advisers and 
our girl-advisers at school, our infant Samuels, who are early 
wise, and young Deborahs, who will sit and judge Israel. 
The simplicity of Christian folk who misread the text of 
wisdom proceeding from the " mouths of babes and suck- 
lings," not as prophetic of a new dispensation, but as real 
and actual, gives some credence to this early claim of the 
young ; and in religious families we find sm_all boys ready 
to expound texts full of insuperable difficulties, and appren- 
tices and young clerks, confessedly failures in their own 
" line of business," as they would phrase it, ready to enter 
the Church and to undertake a cure of souls. This reminds 
one of a discontented coachman who complained of his 
team, " They all want to go different ways — one pulls one 
way, one another; no one consults me. No, IVe had 
enough of it ; I want some easy work now — a good sinecure. 
I should just do for a Prime Minister ! " And it is really to 
be noted, as amongst instances of ignorance much to be 



ADVICE GRATIS. ^^ 

deplored, that the lower orders believe that men high in 
office do not work, that a Prime Minister's place is a sine- 
cure, and that he always finds some one else to work for him. 
That ministers of the Crown play and " sport away" the gold 
that the people pay in taxes is a vulgar tradition older than 
Cowper, who made use of the prejudice. How hard Palmer- 
ston worked even in sickness, the jauntiest and least jaded 
of all, may be seen in Dr. Granville's interesting memoirs. 

The amount of advice which Finance Ministers receive is 
something astounding. There is not an article on the earth 
or under the earth, in the waters or above them, but is 
brought forward as taxable. It was no doubt some officious 
fool that suggested to the Roman emperor that celebrated 
tax which has left behind it a memorable epigram on the 
sweetness of money; it was another of the same sort who 
doubtless made Pitt tax the very light of heaven, and endow 
England for many years with ugly houses and badly venti- 
lated dwellings ; and perhaps, if ever we know the secret 
histo'y of the present time, we shall find that Mr. Lowe's 
match-tax was a happy thought of some wiseacre, although 
the classical and punning motto may have been the late 
Chancellor's own. We must not credit such volunteer ad- 
visers with all the errors of the Government ; on the con- 
uary, there is much that we owe to them in Army, Navy, 
Church, and State ; and it is one proof of the happy consti- 
tution of England that almost every tax-payer is one who is 



84 THE BETTER SELF. 

an ardent politician, and who spends many of his waking 
thoughts in endeavouring to discover how he can put a bur- 
den off the shoulders of his .own class, and quietly adjust it 
on those of another. 

In private life advisers are as thick as leaves in a wood, 
or as flies in a grocer's shop. A man may be too mean for 
any employment except listening to advice j he may be too 
poor for a bribe ; but he is not too poor to receive a good 
round lump of advice upon any occasion. Amongst the 
many evils from which the poor man suffers, we do not per- 
haps reckon that of the multitude of advisers who darken 
counsel by words without wisdom, or take into account its 
vast importance ; for a man who gives another advice is 
either a leader or a mis-leader — blessed if the first, accursed 
if the la^t. Every lady with five hundred pounds a year of 
her own can tell the poor sempstress who earns her fifteen 
shillings a week how to spend and scrape and save much 
better than that poor victim of experience herself The 
gentleman with his fifteen thousand a year knows how to 
teach Hodge with his pound a week and six children the 
way to bring up a family in honesty and sobriety, in the fear 
of God, and out of the workhouse. The squire means well, 
but he cannot know what Hodge knows ; and the working- 
classes are irritated beyond endurance by vexatious sug- 
gestions which can do no good, and too often betoken a 
miserable thoughtlessness. There are two or three instances 



ADVICE GRATIS. 85 

of this good advice turning to bitterest poison which have 
become historical. It was said in a tone of genuine pity, 
by a lady of the Court in the reign of Louis XVI., when the 
mob of Paris was clamouring for bread, " Poor creatures ! 
No bread to eat ! Then let them eat cakes ! " The last 
sentence was meant as a benevolent suggestion, and was not 
more thoughtlessly stupid than a noble Duke's letter to the 
papers, recommending in the Irish famine, when the poor 
bodies of the ''finest peasantry in the world" wanted much 
filling with bread and meat, a pinch of curry in warm water 
as a soothing and nourishing soup. 

The general adviser, with his little hoard of cut-and- 
dried maxims, meets us at every turn of life. Let us suppose 
that we are about to fulfil what Mr. Ruskin thinks one of 
the ends of life, and build a house, well planned and com- 
fortable, suited to our modest requirements. Stra^htway 
we are taken in hand by the ''learned Kett," who lays down, 
as three irrefragable rules — (i) that a man should never 
build after he is forty-five years of age — which is just about 
the time that man, who is a building animal, desires to build, 
and has earned money to do so j (2) that he should not lay 
a stone unless he has five years' clear income in hand ; (3) 
that he should always expect that the cost will be twice, l 
not three times, the amount of the estimate. No doubt he 
who bears this advice in mind will not be disappointed, but, 
if all were to do so, building would nearly cease. Why 



86 THE BETTER SELF. 

should a builder's estimate be so uniformly insufficient? 
What should we say of a tailor or a butcher who contracted 
to supply us with clothes or meat at a certain price, and 
then demanded double his first charge ? But this is not the 
only advice the ambitious builder of a house meets with. 
Architects by the score encounter him on every side; in the 
matters of drainage and ventilation he cannot stir a step ; 
certain parties insist upon telling him all about his dust-bins; 
and, lastly, to dwarf or stamp out all originality, there is a 
general shout that, ^i Fools build houses and wise men live 
in them.^ 

^ In the matter of taking a wife — a far more important 
step than that of building a house — one's good advisers 
would be as plentiful as blackberries were an opportunity 
given. But the other sex perhaps suffers more than we men 
in that matter. It is just the one thing upon which almost 
every man enters with a cruel doubt, but upon which he is 
supposed to have made up his mind. At any rate, the best 
way to make up a lover's mind upon that point is to oppose 
him ; then, and then alone, he is sure of being right. But 
his friends for the major part are sure that he is wrong. 
How many brides and bridegrooms have been married 'his 
year whose friends have not had serious doubts as to fitness, 
compatibility of temper, agreement of habits, of thouglil, or 
of religion ? As for the bride herself, the probability is that 
she has been so lectured and bored by advisers and good- 



ADVICE GRATIS. 87 

natiired friends that she enters upon her wedding duties in a 
sea of doubt, and with a dim notion that she is making a 
muddle of it. And for both man and wife, nay, for single 
as well as married, there remains that sweet bit of consoli- 
dated wisdom, that very essence of bitter advice, which was 
given by a sage some years before the Deluge, and has sur- 
vived in some Shemitic record every other scrap of antedi- 
luvian wisdom. " Shall I marry or not marry ? " asked a not 
very ardent youth of the sage. The ancient took three 
weeks to consider, and at the end of that time delivered 
himself of these oracular words, " Whether you rrarry or do 
not marry, you are sure to repent." We are sorry to add 
that several other sages have laid claim to having originated 
this icy bit of comfort, the coldness of which is only equalled 
by its utter uselessness. 

It is a very difficult matter to give advice well ; so much 
so, indeed, that the best adviser is he who really knows little 
or nothing of the parties for whom he arbitrates, or to whom 
he gives advice. He must merely consider them as ab- 
stractions, and throw aside all other considerations save the 
justness and fitness of the case. Above all, advice should 
seldom be volunteered ; it is one of the things of which we 
can do with a little, and that we must desire, as Sairey 
Gamp said of the bottle of gin to which she so often applied, 
" Don't arst me whether I will or whether I won't have none, 
but put the bottle on the chimbley-place, and let me put my 



88 THE BETTER SELF, 

lips to it when I am so dispoged." Advice is all very well 
when we are " so dispoged/' but when we are not it is 
offensive. It is essentially of advice that we may say speech 
is silver and silence is gold. It always infers, however 
gently it may be given, a certain superiority in the giver 
over the receiver. Hence the sage Johnson hints that 
"advice is offensive, not because it lays us open to unex- 
pected regret, or convicts us of any fault which has escaped 
our notice, but because it shows us that we are known to 
others as well as to ourselves ; and the officious monitor is 
persecuted with hatred, not because his accusation is false, 
but because he assumes the superiority Avhich we are not 
willing to grant him, and has dared to detect what we desire 
to conceal." 

The *' superiority " is perhaps the most galling to our 
pride ; hence he who gives advice should do as nurses do 
with their physic — give it in small doses and with something 
to overcome the nausea it creates. The powder-and-jam 
school so much affected in " pretty little tales for pretty 
little children," and in sweet, angelic tracts, in which every- 
body is made happy at the end — and all tears are very idle 
tears, indeed, since they have been wept in quite a mistaken 
notion of life — is one to which most professional advisers 
are at last driven. In fact, every one is so opinionated that 
he imagines that his own advice is better than any one else's 
until he loses by it. 



ADVICE GRATIS, 89 

Swift confesses that he forgets whether advice is one of 
the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the 
moon, but certainly it ought to be there, since so much of 
it is given and so much thrown away and lost. Even those 
who ask advice do not take it — 

** His friends were summoned on a point so nice 
To pass their judgments and to give advice, 
But fixed before and well resolved \^as he, 
As those who ask advice are wont to be." 

And this is the only pleasurable bit of revenge that the 
advisee has over the adviser. He need not take the advice, 
and he can think the man who gives it an officious coxcomb 
all the time he goes prosing on with his pros and coiis and 
his eternal pour et contre, of which the French Bar in the time 
of Louis le Grand aiforded so brilliant an example. The 
lawyers balanced their periods and their quotations, quite 
regardless of the sense or justice of the case, as an acrobat 
balances his pole, and dehghted the audience with their in- 
tellectual agility. And the summing-up of the judge w^as an 
equally clever piece of forensic cookery. But then it was 
seen that advice in some cases is pleasant, and that is to the 
third party, who listens to it, and admires the application 
which he imagines that he sees ; the most scathing and 
cutting sarcasms on the conduct of a prisoner at the bar are 
always most rehshed by the audience in court. It is 
ple;isant to hear good advice given, or to read it when 



90 THE BETTER SELF. 

intended for others ; nay, we may recognize our own case 
in that which is before us, and receive timely warning by a 
light which was held out to save some other wanderer from 
getting into trouble. It follows, then, that advice, amongst 
other qualities, should be general rather than special : if it 
fits our case, we profit by it ; but, when we get it made to 
order, it is too often like an artistically-shaped dandy boot, 
which pinches the wearer so terribly that it hinders rather 
than aids his progression. 

The best advice, and that likely to do most good, is like 
the most wholesome bread, home-made. It is, perhaps, 
for that reason the rougher, but the sweeter too, and the 
most palatable. A gentleman the other day, summoned by 
the school-board, paraded the fact that he was, very happily 
for himself, under the governance of his wife. He was an 
ass for making it public, but he might have been wisely 
governed. Certainly some of the very wisest and bravest 
advice men get is from their wives, although a wife is not 
always nor necessarily a good adviser — she needs mu^ be 
somewhat of a partisan. But then she is certainly another, 
a calmer, and a better self, and men wisely revert to them, 
although too often one has reason to say with Burns :— 

**Ah ! gentle dames ! it gars me greet, 
To think how mony counsels sweet, 
How mony lengthened sage advices, 
The husband frae the wife despises ! ** 



( 91 ) 



IX. 
PRIDE IN THE FAMIL K 

"The big Ha' Bible once his father's pride," is not now 
the work most studied by the middle-class Briton, but there 
is a book, a very large book indeed, containing nearly 
two thousand pages of double columns and close print, 
which Thackeray called the " Englishman's Bible." It is 
not his ledger, nor his book of the law, nor his Shakspere, 
nor his Milton, nor even his tables of interest, by which 
he can calculate to a fraction all his gains in the various 
companies he has joined ; but simply his peerage. It 
contains about as many lies as any book can well 
contain, although it is fairly edited, and may be called 
historical. But the fact is, that tliis peerage to which 
Sir Bernard Burke puts his name as editor, and to which 
he pays much attention, is contributed to by the families 
themselves, the exploits of whose progenitors it dilates 
upon, or the bare names of whose ancestors it contains. 
Hence therj arises a mass of fiction and error which is 
incalculable. Ancestors are found for any one who achieves 



92 THE BETTER SELF. 

distinction, for any Lord Mayor who may be made a 
baronet, or for any Court favourite who, however un- 
worthily, may be raised to the Peerage. We are told that 
the ancestors of this nobleman fought at Hastings or 
Bosworth-field, and how the founders of that family claim 
kindred with the Vikings of the North, and sailed across 
the German Ocean with King Olaf or Red Eric the Earl. 
Such, to say the least of it, is difficult to prove, and opens 
up a very serious question when proved. All that one can 
say of being descended from the Conqueror himself is that 
one traces one's pedigree up to a brave man ; but surely we 
are not all cowards to be so proud of bravery ; and if, like 
that of the Yankee pedlar, our " father had fit inter the 
Great Revolution " as a common soldier, we might be more 
proud of the immediate than of the distant progenitor. But 
all men in a battle are brave, or they pass for brave, which 
is in result the same thing ; and the companions of William 
the Conqueror were merely a small band of hired soldiers, 
whose descendants have most likely died down in the 
troublous times that succeeded him, or were afterwards used 
up in the Crusades, the Norman wars, and the Wars of the 
Roses ; so that very few really Norman families remain. 
But the argument of long descent being put aside, as 
difficult to prove and useless when proved, we shall not do 
away with that feeling called "family pride" — a sort of 
reflected selfishness, which, like the house-leek or the stone- 



PRIDE IN THE FAMILY. 93 

crop, seems to grow and flourish all the better, the smaller 
the nourishment it receives. If you plant stone-crop in a 
rich loam, it runs " spindly,'' as the gardeners say, and dies 
out ; but if you stick it in, the cranny of an old wall, where 
there is only a bit of dried mortar and a small portion of 
rotten stone for it to adhere to, it flourishes admirably. So 
is it with family pride. 

In Mr. Dickens's novels family pride is skilfully por- 
trayed in very lowly people. Mrs. Wilfer, whose husband 
is a poor clerk, but a very angel of goodness, takes no 
delight in him, and does not even know what a treasure 
she has; but gives herself airs about herself, hei^ family 
and her belongings. So also in " Nicholas Nickleby," 
Mrs. Kenwigs, whose husband is an ivory turner, is always 
talking of hei^ uncle, who is a tax collector. Women 
abound in this pride much more than men do ; and it is a 
subtle touch of observation both in Dickens and Thackeray 
that induces them to m.ake their characters always refer to 
the official position of the hero who ennobles the family. 
" My uncle the beadle, my grandfather the turncock," — 
such officials have graced families heretofore and do so now, 
and are just as legitimately referred to as " My uncle the 
bishop," or " my grandfather the general ; " for it is to be 
accepted as a rule, almost without an exception, that when- 
ever a man rises he rises through himself, by his o^vn efforts, 
and that his family has nothing to do with his advancement 



94 THE BETTER SELF. 

— that IS, his brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, 
grandsons and daughters, and all the rest who brag about 
him after he has risen. 

To vaunt our family is, in a cunning way, indirectly but 
efficaciously to vaunt ourselves. Yet some of us have 
portraits in our own family, to which we own a mysterious 
and perhaps a stupid attachment; we feel that somehow 
such portraits prove that the family has been compact and 
known, and rich for some time, although the present repre- 
sentative may be poor. We have one or two old books, 
heirlooms, a chair or so, and such like wrecks of genteel 
ancestiy, and of course are attached to them. Nay, we do 
not despise as we ought the genealogical tree ; and yet we 
know that great great grandfathers and uncles did little or 
nothing save serve in the army, or sit upon the bench as 
county magistrates, as stupid as the rest. And we know, 
philosophically, that the meanest beggar is as far descended 
as the king, and that the beggar's son could count a roll of 
ancestry, if he only knew how, longer by one than the 
beggar ] nay, we know that the poor have, as a rule in life, 
been better and purer than the rich, and that it would be 
wiser to be proud of being " the son of parents passed 
into the skies" than of being the descendant of Caesar, 
Alexander, Gen-his Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, or any 
such conquerors. And yet, being men, we and every one 
of our readers have a certain family pride, although we 



PRIDE IN THE FAMILY. 95 

laugh at it, and sneer at it in others, as any sensible person 
must, because in its sum total it is a distorted reflection of 
self — that is all. 

Some families, which cannot boast even a rector or a 
militia captain to date from, take pride in personal attri- 
butes, which some others would think rather to be distortions 
than otherwise. Most of us are familiar with the Brunswick 
mouth, which shows the front teeth, and gives a somewhat 
foolish appearance to the family; but then its possessors 
reckon it a beauty, because it is a mark of breed. There 
was the Austrian chin of poor Marie Antoinette — a long 
chin, not pretty, but distinctive ; then there is the retreating 
forehead of the Braganzas, a proof of high breed no doubt, 
since by too much breeding the Braganzas very nearly 
approached the apes. A better feature in English families 
is the Plantagenet long flat cheek, which Norman peculiarity 
Emerson says may be seen in Englishmen of to-day. Nay, 
he tells us that we preserve the very features of the old race 
amongst us. " In the bronze monuments of crusaders 
lying cross-legged in the Temple Church in London, and in 
those of Worcester and Salisbury Cathedrals, which are 
seven hundred years old, the heads are of the same type as 
the best youthful heads of men now in England ; please by 
beauty of the same character; — an expression blending 
good nature, valour, and refinement, and mainly that un- 
cormpt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily seen 
in the streets of London." 



96 THE BETTER SELF. 

It is family pride that makes one copy out that passage, 
for the nation is in itself but one great family ; and villages, 
towns, counties, or countries, have a natural pride in 
knowing that the great and good qualities of the men they 
have produced are appreciated ; and there is this about the 
feeling which is admirable, which is, that it leads us to 
admire that w^hich is noble in others, although we may 
believe that in some indirect way the glory is reflected back 
upon ourselves. Thus in Yorkshire, when a racehorse has 
been successful in winning a race^he glory of the achieve- 
ment is shared by the whole stable or village ; as if, indeed, 
a horse from that identical stable were any the better on 
that account. But the glory of a family does help a man 
through life, until, indeed, he becomes ver}^ debased. Men 
believe in association ; and a Stanley is honourable, not 
from the best motives, but because he is a Stanley. Noblesse 
oblige. Having to date from a fair lineage, a man will be 
careful not to soil that lineage : thus the Spartan boys were 
brave, not alone because their nerves were stronger than 
those of others, but for the reason that they were Spartans, 
and had an hereditary virtue descending upon them from 
their family or other people. It was not a physical — it was 
a mental gift : to be base or effeminate was so utterly out of 
the practice of the Spartans, that it never entered into their 
minds to become so. 

With this kind of family pride we can all S5mipathize. 



PRIDE IN THE FAMILY. 97 

When we hear a man proud of the Smith nose, the mouth 
of the Browns, the forehead of the Joneses, or the hereditary 
squint or wall-eye of the Williamses, we may set him down 
as a fool ; but when we meet with a man who finds it 
incumbent on him to act well and honourably, because his 
family always did so before him, we are delighted with that 
honourable respect which he pays to the virtue of his family. 
And such hereditary virtues are not uncommon. " My 
father," said a tradesman, the other day, " always paid his 
rent at twelve o'clock on quarter-day, and I will always 
do so;" and the man, through life, had made great struggles 
to keep up to that excellent virtue of punctual payment. 
So we have an hereditary fon^'^ardness in brave actions : 
some families in out-lying villages are always ready to head 
the list of Christmas benevolences ; some are devoted to a 
life at sea; some to the army and to particular service 
therein; — all through family pride. Certain regiments, as 
the " Fighting Fiftieth," having once earned a reputation, 
dower every private soldier in their ranks with a family pride 
in their good name, which makes him all the better man. 
Reputation continues to act long after the particular deed 
that won it is forgotten. 

There is, then, even a very beautiful side from which we 
may regard this foolish pride. When pride in ancestry came 
up we hardly know; for certainly all the ancients did not look, 
as we do, to a man's family, since the Romans could adopt 

H 



98 THE BETTER SELF. 

a total stranger, who, thereon, had all the merit of blood- 
descent Some people think that the lineage of our 
Saviour, given in the commencement of two of our Gospels 
— and given for an especial purpose — set men's minds, 
always prone to self-flattery, upon the utter vanity of birth. 
But certainly the ancients did refer to paternal acres, and 
the deeds of their ancestors, as well as we do; and Plutarch, 
in his familiar, easy way, lets us see that the pride of 
ancestry was no stranger to him. In the life of Brutus, who 
slew Csesar, and who is one of Plutarch's great favourites, 
he lets us into the secret at once : " The great ancestor," 
says he, "of Marcus Brutus, was that Junius Brutus to whom 
the Romans erected a statue of brass, and placed it in the 
Capitol among their kings." Again, speaking of his hero, 
he says that "he was formed for virtue, both by nature — />., 
descent — and education;" and he further on tells us that 
the partisans of Caesar would not have it that Marcus Brutus 
was descended from Junius Brutus, whose family, they 
said, was extinct with his two sons. Marcus Brutus was, 
according to them, a mere plebeian, the son of a steward, 
who was "one Brutus, of mean extraction." What does it 
matter to us now who did the noble action ? What do we 
care if the Bruce came of a line of kings, or if Wallace 
was a mere common fellow? Nelson, Blake, Cromwell, 
have seiTed their country ; we hardly want to know whether 
they were of noble blood or not. How many disputes have 



PRIDE IN THE FAMILY. 99 

we had about Shakspere ! — some saying that he was the 
son of a wool-stapler and butcher, who was of mere common 
and puddle blood ; and others that his lineage, like his 
name, was knightly. Certainly he himself paid for his 
father's grant of arms, that well-known spear on a bend ; 
but surely no one would have cared to ask whether he was 
well-born or not, if he had been as undistinguished as the 
thousands of fine-blooded noblemen who lived and died 
while he was writing plays ! There is this strange peculiarity 
about family pride, which is indicative of weakness — it likes 
to claim all great people as of a great race. We are Chinese 
in our sympathies. A great man in China ennobles his 
ancestors ; he cannot do a great deed without very properly 
reflecting a lustre on his father and mother and grandfather 
— the reverse way to our own, but nevertheless the wiser 
way. 

^ "Everything in this world," said a great philosopher, 
V has two handles ; " and if we take hold of the right one 
( we shall do well. The man who prides himself upon the 
worth of his family may himself become worthy even by 
that weakness. But woe to the man who has nothing to 
boast of but the position of his father, the beauty or r'.ches 
of his mother, and the virtues of his ancestors ! " He is," 
said Sir Thomas Overbury, " very much like a potato — the 
best part of him is underground." Even Lord Lyndsay, in 
his " Lives of the Lyndsays," is obliged to resort to a senti- 



lOO THE BETTER SELF. 

mental regard to ancestry, rather than a pride in it, of which 
he is half-ashamed, and talks of the "additional energy 
which the pi'ecepts of a father should inspire us with, when 
we ti'ace the transmission of those precepts from father to 
son through successive generations." Alas ! such tracing is 
a difficult task. We cannot honour a man who stands for 
merit merely "on his forefather's feet, by heraldry proved 
valiant and discreet ; '' for we must in our heart of hearts 
believe with Young that self-help and merit arising from our 
own virtues and actions are the things to be looked at 

**Men should press forward in the glorious chase; 
Nobles look backward, and so lose the race. 
Let high birth triumph ! What can be more great i 
Nothing,— but merit in a low est?te." 



( loi ) 



X. 

SNEERS AND ILL-NATURE. 

It is a great deal more easy to hurt than it is to please 
and gratify a man. The Emperor who offered a reward for 
a new pleasure, would have been quite satisfied with an old 
pain ; a kick on his august shins, for instance, would have 
roused his ire sooner than the sweetest sauce would have 
stirred his jaded appetite. 

Recognizing and illustrating the above truth, the fools 
of the human family take to jeering, sneering, and ill-nature, 
as the readiest way of making their weight felt. A gnat 
would perhaps sink into the insignificance of being forgotten, 
if he did not make himself felt by his sting ; and the thrust- 
ing out of the bayonet of a wasp is no doubt a sudden 
pleasure to it. Moreover there is an immense power in a 
laugh, especially when raised at the right time. Few persons, 
unless they are exceedingly strong-minded, can stand against 
it ; and when a fashion or a mode of thought is overgrown 
and old, a sound honest laugh will often knock it down. 



I02 THE BETTER SELF. 

Lord Byron wrote of that brave and honest satire "Don 

Quixote " — 

** Cervantes laugh'' d Spain's chivalry away," — 

but his lordship did not explain that Spain's true chivalry 
had long since departed, and that the mere outer clothing, 
shell, imitation, symbol, and idol stood in its stead, to 
be knocked to pieces by a worn-out, broken-down old 
soldier, dying from neglect, poverty, cold, and hunger, 
and yet the most powerful and by far the best man in al 
Spain; truly, almost the only one, for what to us, to our 
grandfathers, and great-great-grandsons, will be the Spain 
of his day, except Cervantes ? All the pride of her mon- 
arch, great as it was, so great as to disdain the earth and 
to claim Heaven, — all the pride of its great churchmen, who 
swayed the minds and the faith of millions, and who dictated 
the very terms upon which Heaven was to be won and 
Hell avoided, — all the pride of the great swelling hidalgos, 
the great dons, cousins of the kingj and of the bluest blood 
that circulated in Castile, — all the pride of the clerks, the 
heralds, the officers, the scriveners, and the very beggars 
(and a Spanish beggar at that time held himself higher than 
an English nobleman) — all of this was shaken to pieces, 
and faded like the ghost in " Hamlet " " on the crowing 
of the cock," before the honest laughter of Cervantes ; and 
he remains, worth more than all of his nation and his day 
put together. 



SNEEI^S AND ILL-NATURE. 103 

So there is, as there should be, much power in a laugh. 
There is also much in its imitation, — its bastard imitation, 
the sneer. A good sound laugh is something pre-eminently 
human. It is not godlike, because we suppose it is not 
compatible with the modern awe-full notions of the god- 
head. But the old divinities laughed and smiled ; and 
when the divinities laughed, as at the tripping up of Hebe 
in serving the nectar, or at human follies, the heavens 
re-echoed. For the old gods were more human and nearer 
to man, being creatures of his high imagination ; therefore 
they laughed ; and man laughs, — human, as Shakspere has 
it ; but the devils sneer, and of late it has become fashion- 
able to imitate the devils. 

Why sneering should be thought clever is not difficult 
to guess. The sneer implies a superiority ; and the insect 
on the leaf is too apt in this world to affect an easy victory, 
which he has not won over the insect in the dust. He who 
has not battled with life, and knows little of its hardships, 
not only of the difficulty of gaining a battle, but of keeping 
his soldiers together on the march, will criticize the old and 
well-worn veterans who have won in many a hard fight, — 
will detract from their merit ; and after the thing is done, 
point out an apparently easier and better way to have done 
it. And the very act, illnatured as it is, seems to confer 
upon the sneerer the merit which he detracts from another; 
just as in savage countries the painted and tattooed brave, 



I04 THE BETTER SELF. 

who has killed a warrior of merit and excellence, claims the 
victories of the deceased manslayer. 

Moreover, the human heart does so love truth, and 
gives so willing a credence to that which people say, that in 
many cases the detractor is believed ; and this is especially 
the case when the sneerer has the power of commanding the 
utterance of a respectable print. The oracular pro7iiincia' 
viientos of the newspapers are sometimes ridiculous enough ; 
but they have before this broken hearts, and made the 
sensitive breast of the poet or artist dilate and throb with 
the most painful feelings. The animadversions of non- 
military critics, written at home by the fireside, and ex- 
pressed with as much freedom as ignorance, have been 
more than suspected of driving an officer to give battle 
at an illjudged time, and have cost both men and reputa- 
tion ; and more than one gallant man has been driven into 
enforced exile, to misery and disgrace, nay, even to suicide, 
from the same cause. And yet it was not envy, nor hatred, 
nor malice, that prompted the conceited wiseacres to act as 
they did; but merely a priggish delight to believe nobody in 
the right but themselves, a wish to offend and to hurt, and 
a love of meddling. It is a happy thing for us all that they 
often burn their own fingers. 

After a certain time spent in practising the art of sneer- 
ing, wicked and really stupid as it is, the initiated get a 
certain delicacy of touch which is easily seen by an acute 



SNEEJ^S AND ILL-NATURE. 105 

observer, but which is dreadfully offensive to the young. 
They cannot stand up, if they are at all ingenuous and 
intense in their modesty and feeling, against such sneerers ; 
Vv^hile they find, and find readily, quite enough strength 
to repel the coarser and the less practised scandal. Sheri- 
dan has so well described the two — the coarser scandalizer, 
and the more effective and dangerous sneerer — that it would 
be a loss not to quote him. "Mrs. Clackett," he says, "has 
a very pretty talent, and a great deal of industry; she has 
been the cause of six matches being broken off, and of three 
sons being disinherited ; of four forced elopements, as many 
close confinements, nine separate maintenances, and two 
divorces. She generally designs well, has a free tongue and 
a bold invention ; but her colouring is too dark, and her 
outlines are often extravagant. She wants that delicacy of 
tint and mellowness of sneer which distinguish your lady- 
ship's scandal. Everybody allows that Lady Sneerwell can 
do more with a word or a look than many can do with the 
most laboured detail." 

It is with the touch of a master also that Sheridan shows 
us the motive for such malignity, while he makes us almost 
pity the woman whom we should detest. "Wounded 
myself in the early part of my life by the envenomed tongue 
of slander," says Lady Sneerwell, " I confess I have since 
known 110 pleasure equal to that of reducing others to the 
level of ?ny own reputation.^^ 



io6 THE BETTER SELF. 

It is indeed that motive which induces our modem 
Sneerwells to indulge in their smaller and less noxious 
enterprises ; which, however, if smaller, have the advantage 
of being considerably meaner. We can understand why a 
woman who has herself been stung should feel impelled by 
an envious spirit to blacken the characters of her sisters ; 
but a generous nature cannot but be astonished to find 
that persons who are unknown to him, whom he has not 
wTonged, nay, those whom he has benefited, are ready to 
detract from his modest stock of merit, — to w^hisper, to hint, 
to asperse, and to blacken without a cause. But such is 
the fashion of the day. Let any one have a name known to 
the public, and let that name be mentioned, and as surely 
as the night follows the day, after a little cold praise, cold 
as the morning's sun in winter, hot envy and jealous detrac- 
tion follow. " He is clever of course, aitd the work would 

be good, if- " And then the floodgates of speech are 

opened, and the poor fellow has black marks by the dozen 
affixed to him. And frequently all this will be done for 
just the same reason as that which induced the countryman 
to cast in his oyster shell to the ballot to banish Aristides ; 
not because he knew any evil of that great man, but because 
he was tired of hearing him praised ; nay, he was sick of his 
name. And it unfortunately happens that the temper of 
the public is such that sometimes, just at the turn of the 
tide as it were, the detractor, by a well-timed word, gets 



SN££I^S AND ILL-NA TURK. 107 

the best of it. There was once a sufficiently meritorious 

comedy called "Sancho Panza," produced in Paris, as Menage 

tells the story. At the close of the third act the Duke in 

the piece yawns, and says, " I begin to get tired of Sancho.'' 

" Egad, so do I ! " said a wag in the pit, taking his hat up, 

and walking out ; and that word and action settled the fate 

of the comedy. All the house joined in the laugh and the 

yawn, and the play (in theatrical phraseology) was damned. 

More than one meritorious author has been sneered out of 

public favour rather because he had a queer name than for 

any thing else. There is Mr. Amos Cottle, for instance, 

who was by no means a fool. 

" Oh, Amos Cottle ! Phoebus ! what a name 
For endless ages to hand down to Fame ! " 

sneered Lord Byron : but Cottle no more deserved to be 
sneered at for his name than his lordship to be blamed 
for his lameness. The whole question of names is curious ; 
and, if Mr. Cottle could have been born a Howard, a 
Plantagenet, or a Percy, perhaps he would have so chosen. 
There is an author of the present day who may have written 
platitudes, but has certainly never written any thing vicious, 
while he has written much that is incentive to good \ yet he 
has been sneered down systematically, partly because he 
possesses a somewhat comic name, which looks funny in 
a clever article. And directly one of the sneerers began to 
attack him, as he was not very big, all the others followed. 



io8 THE BETTER SELF. 

until the public has at last begun to believe agains't its own 
belief, and to abandon an old favourite. 

There is some comfort, even to a wise and reflective man, 
to know that the sneerers punish themselves ; but it is small 
comfort to think that there are so many of them that the age 
has sensibly deteriorated in generosity within these few 
years. The young men some fifteen years ago used to 
believe in generous impulses, in the advance of the masses, 
in progress, and a grand future. They would patiently sit 
out even the turgid love-poetry of Sir Edward Bulwer 
Lytton, and believe in innocence and beauty. But now- 
a-days the young man has grown cunning. All he has to 
say is, '' Not for Joseph," with a sly wink ; he knows too 
much, or affects to know too much, for his compeers ; and 
when the deeds of a hero or the self-sacrifice of a patriot are 
mentioned to him, all that he wants to know is, " How 
much did he get by it ? '' " What will it pay," is his ques- 
tion, rather than what is right ; and thus biased, not by 
principle, but by results, he is just the man to believe in 
the veneered cleverness of a tribe of writers who think 
to raise themselves by depressing others. For proof of 
this we have only to read some of the smart essayists of the 
day, who place the title of some virtue or good quality at 
the top of their essay, and descant ' upon it only to prove 
that it does not exist. 

Were we to consider the matter deeply, we might lose 



SNEERS AND ILL-NATURE. 109 

temper about it. Sneering is so far from being clever, 
that it encourages the most detestable of vices. Sir R. 
Maltravers remarks, that " it is a corroding cancer most 
destructive to human happiness, and it shortens human 
life. La^\7ers, players, and politicians, are much subject 
to itj" and he might have added, small poets, writers 
of books, artists, architects, and all whose works are more 
public than others'. When a man is very great indeed, 
his merit beats down some opposition ; but what it beats 
down is the openly-expressed envy, not that which is 
secret and most harmful. With nations — for with them 
it exists — it is the cause of war, having been first its 
pretext ] with individuals, it is the cause of '^ envy, hatred, 
and malice, and all uncharitableness,'' from which in our 
Litany we heartily pray, " Good Lord deliver us ! " 

We have said before that it is some comfort to a wise 
man, who never rejoices in the evil of any one, to know 
that these sneerers come to grief themselves, and, like 
the priests of Baal, howl vigorously to their false gods 
in vain : for envy, bad in most things, is good in this, 
that it sorely torments the man who indulges in it. We 
can read in letters and pamphlets, still extant, the mean 
jealousy of the smaller poets, who sneered at Shakspere 
as a "Johannes Factotum, the veriest Shake-scene in all 
the country, a fellow who would do you whole hamlets 
of plays ; " and we know, as certainly as if we had his 



no THE BETTER SELF. 

doctor's certificate, that the jaundiced passion made the 

poor wretch pale and miserable, and made him, as he 

says, lament for " his groat's worth of wit bought with 

a pound's worth of repentance." Happily, in the greatest 

of poets we have no record of this mean spite. We do 

not find him sneering at anything ; his creations bear some 

of his divine soul in them, and look upon the blundering, 

ignorant constables with a pitying good-humour too noble 

and too open for a sneer. But he — even he — bursts out 

into a flame of declamation against the detractors of a 

great man : — 

"Now I feel 
Of what coarse metal ye are moulded,— envy. 
How eagerly ye follow my disgraces, 
As if it fed ye ! and how sleek and wanton 
Ye appear in every thing may bring my ruin ! 
Follow yom- envious courses, men of malice — ^^ 

The good man, therefore^ must rejoice to think how much 
the envious man misses of the good of this world, knowing 
as he does that when the sun shines and the weather is 
charming, the envious fellow is unhappy within because 
of another's success, and will not enjoy the good around 
him, because others are, as he fancies, enjoying more 
pleasure than he. 

Again, while the sneering critic detracts from a man, 
he at the same time adds to him, since envy is as much 
the compliment to greatness and merit as imitation is 



SN£EJ^S AND ILL-NA TURE. 1 1 1 

a proof of real admiration. If, as the chained eagle 
Napoleon would have it when he was chained and ill, 
the Duke of Wellington was no general, and that all his 
victories were merely lucky hits, is it likely that he 
would have stooped to constantly malign and criticize 
his actions? 

No one who tries to raise himself to something better 
than he has been , but will try and root out jhat common 
itch of ill nature, so ^ peral aL present, and so noxious 
in a family. It is a vice easily fallen into ; a young fellow 
says a bitter thing tQ his sister, and makes the girl turn 
red and cry, and he feels his weight. Then he tries his 
hand somewhere else, until he finally sets up, after leaving 
a vinegary reputation, and being thoroughly hated at his 
college, for a critic. And a nice time he has of it. 
Criticism is not like Rosherville, exactly the place to 
spend a happy day, or life, in. No one is so soon forgotten 
as a critic. He makes an actor's or an artist's reputation, 
and he is forgotten and unknown himself The very men 
he has served neglect him when their name is made. The 
reputations he tries to kill survive him, and the poor 
fellows whom he stabs, not knowing their assailant, write 
to thank him for his kind assistance. Thus even the 
most effective envy punishes its user. 

As a shadow, when visible, is a proof of the existence 
of a brighter hght, so the attraction of envy and bitter 



112 THE BETTER SELF. 

words may be taken as a proof of merit This may- 
console the individual. General detraction, which is a 
safe way to indulge in sneering, does not, however, admit 
of such consolation. It is an ill-bred, ill-natured and 
nurtured vice this. Its general capacity gives it a very 
frequent particular application ; it raises jealousy, and 
poisons honest, simple natures. 

The general sneerer detracts from the general stock 
of goodness, or renders it negative, which is the same 
thing ; and in his Book of Proverbs, Solomon declares such 
a spirit to be " rottenness to the bones." Such can exist, 
not only in the mind of a man, but in the feelings of a 
generation. With such a spirit nothing is fair, no on^ 
is wise, no one is good ; there is a speck in every fruit, a 
flaw in every fair glass, alloy in the purest gold. It 
laments over prosperity, sickens at the sight of health, 
shuts its eyes to all beauties. And thus, with half-shut 
eyes, with a soul squatting somewhere in his body, the 
envious man sits at home, doing little but breaking some 
poor spider's web, which the busy insect as industriously 
remakes. 

But he who would build up the better self, who is wise 
;' and generous, opens his heart not only to the fairness of 
\ noble and beautiful things, but even to search for the 
I soul of goodness in things evil ; while the great so^l, by 
I the light shining within it, at last finds that all things 



1 



SNEERS AND ILL-NATURE. 113 

have their place and all their beauties, and that as know- 
ledge and patience grow, so the certainty of the triumph 
of good grows too, and with it trust in God and faith in 
man. 

From such bright sunlight envy slinks abashed, and 
the sneer wounds not, while the wise man smiles as he 
reflects : the ambitious man may gain power ; the proud 
man satisfaction, luxury, and gluttony, a fugitive and animal 
pleasure; the miser may joy in the brightness of his gold; 
but the envious man reaps nothing but vexation. 



114 ^^^ BETTER SELF. 



XI. 

DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING. 

Closely allied with envy, so closely that one always accom- 
panies the other, is discontent. To grumble and get on is 
supposed to be the natural course of an Englishman's way 
in the world; and he certainly is in this respect a living 
contradiction, in that, not being a very vocal and limber- 
tongued person, he does a great deal of grumbling. We 
are told that we are a nation of grumblers, at the same time 
that w^e are certainly a people which has the utmost appre- 
ciation of silence. In what other nation would the German 
proverb, ^'Silence is golden, speech is silver'^^j — which 
Carlyle has made his own — ^have taken root and spread, 
but in ours? What other people would have gladly wel- 
comed the assertion that they were inarticulate and dumb, 
awaiting the " eternal silences ? " With what pathos does 
the poet's appeal touch us — 

** A beggar that is dumb, you know. 
Deserves a double pity ! " 



DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING. 115 

For what charity are we warmer, than for that which looks 
especially after the deaf and dumb ? Who have taken such 
care of " dumb " animals, as instituting hospitals for lost 
dogs, but the English ? What nation save ours would have 
welcomed the graceful phrase of Lord Mansfield — " Not the 
brute creation, but the mute creation." How struck we 
are with the fact that certain prisoners will not plead, but 
mysteriously " stand mute " — mute for ever in history, and 
solving no question! How we love certain persons who 
figure in our national records after the fashion of " William 
the Silent" and ^^Single-Speech Hamilton!" And with 
what devotion an English constituency clung to the member 
of Parliament who had served them faithfully in the House 
of Commons for twenty-five years, doing able work on com- 
mittees, and who yet, metaphorically speaking, had never 
opened his mouth ! 

It may be taken as a fact, then, that the English and 
Scotch really do admire silent people. It is an old love 
that they have. And with few exceptions silence is a very 
admirable thing. The old Roman said truly — 

** Ssepius locutum, nunquam me tacuisse poenitet ; " 

for, often as we may regret our spoken words, it is but 
seldom that silence gives us pain. But it has its good side 
— and a very fine side that is — and its bad side, which is 
about as dreadful as the other is beautiful, so that it cannot 



ii6 THE BETTER SELF. 

always be adhered to as a rule in life. We will not go the 
length of Shakspere, who tells us that — 

** Silence is only commendable 
In a neat's tongue dried and a maid not vendible ; " 

but we must say that it is not always to be practised. We 
cannot put down a hard and fast line for specific silences, as 
if we were monks of La Trappe, or pupils of Pythagoras, 
undergoing one's five years' term of probation. It is curious 
how oflen human nature has reverted to this vow of silence. 
The disciple of Brahma, the Pythagorean, the Monk, and 
the Quaker, equally betook themselves to silent meditation. 
To this day the Quakers are the most silent of all people, 
and have a good sound rule in their churches, to keep 
silence before they speak, or admonish, or pray. It is said 
that during one of these awful silences the wicked and witty 
Tom Brown entered a meeting-house, and cried, "Hallo! 
here's a penny tart for the first who opens his mouth." 
"Young man," cried an indignant and most venerable elder, 

" young man, why " " The tart's yours ! " said the wit, 

bestowing on him the article, and quickly making his exit. 
Here the Quakers were at a disadvantage, because they did 
not disregard the insulting offer — speech was but silver 
there ; but, in respect of another Quaker episode, related 
by Charles Lamb, the case was different. Three Friends 
on a stage-coach journey, after having eaten a large 



DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING. 117 

luncheon, objected, just as the coach was about to start, 
to the charge. " Friend," said the eldest to the landlord, 
" I make thee a legal tender," holding out a shilling instead 
of half-a-crown. The other Quakers did the same ; but 
Boniface wished their shillings in a place where they would 
probably melt — he would not take the coin. The first 
Quaker said nothing, but, looking on his friends, pocketed 
his shilling, and walked in silence to the coach. His com- 
panions did the same. Lamb, half a Quaker himself, 
followed theit-example, and, all having gravely ascended, they 
were shut in and whirled off. Nor was the silence broken 
for a mile or so, when the eldest asked, gravely, " Friend, 

what was the price of corn at market ? " Here the 

silent ones had the best of the bargain, and it is but just to 
set one story against the other. 

In half of the events of life we may safely assert that 
people are given to say a great deal too much; and the 
terrible waste of time, of ideas, of power, of vitality, by 
this unceasing gabble, is to be deplored. The marvel is 
that these gossips will themselves own that little or no good 
comes of it, and that they often repent of a hasty word, but 
never of a discreet silence. With some persons — not only 
of the female sex — there is a rage for " talk " which amounts 
to a mania — a persistent intention to say something, no 
matter what — a kind of hen-like love of cackling, a deter- 
mination of words to the mouth, which can only be looked 



ii8 THE BETTER SELF. 

at as a disease. There are those who indulge in incessant 
gabblements till they die. It is true that the power of 
holding one's tongue is not given to all of us ; nor is it held 
at all periods of our lives. A pretty good rule as regards 
talking would be only to speak when one has really some- 
thing to say, and then to say it in as few words as possible. 
The general complaint is that there is too much said, and 
too much written. Tacitus, the historian, is said to have 
cut his cloth too narrow to clothe his thoughts, so that one 
has to guess at his meaning. There are few writers now-a- 
days who resemble Tacitus, and still fewer speakers. It is 
not the man who says much, but the man who talks wisely, 
who is listened to ; the word in season which we are told is 
so "good" is only good because it is in season; even sorrow, 
which is usually loquacious and voluble enough, becomes 
respectable and even venerable when silently borne. It 
may be all very well to cry out at first — some natures must 

do so 3 

** Give sorrow tongue — the grief that will not speak 
Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.*' 

In short, in nine-tenths of the world's affairs there is not 
only, as the nigger has it, " nuff sed," but a great deal too 
much said. Our passions are run to tatters, our trials are 
made ridiculous by being exaggerated, our vices are mag- 
nified rather than concealed, and our virtues disappear 
under the flowery covering of our speeches. Ii you want 



DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING, 119 

to make a man hated, praise him ; if you wish to excite the 
world's envy, talk about him. If you had wished to make 
the patriarch Job himself — in the midst of all his sorrows- 
contemptible, you would have published a daily bulletin of 
his sufferings, and, by the time such a method had been but 
half carried out, the man of many troubles would have 
become a bore to everybody. 

We must not forget one use of silence, which is, it seems 
to us, diabolical. It is when one holds an important secret 
which might save a life, or clear up a mystery, and dies with 
it, or so holds it that the person to be annoyed, who is 
generally a husband, is ready to *' burst " with suppressed 
curiosity. This sort of silence is a terrible weapon in a 
wife's hands, and in general life occasions more and more 
talking as time elapses. A soft answer turns away wrath, 
and when a wife or a husband is irritated there is nothing 
like letting a subject drop. Then silence is indeed golden. 
But the silence persisted in — as by the lady in the old 
comedy, who, in reply to her husband's, "For Heaven's 
sake, my dear, do tell me what you mean," obstinately 
keeps her lips closed — is an instrumqat of deadly torture. 
And what a clatter such a foolish silence makes in history ! 
Shall we ever hear the end of the controversy as to who was 
the Man with the Iron Mask ? Many persons must have 
known the wretched man, and yet they let future ages 
" burst " with curiosity about it Then, again, there is that 



I20 THE BETTER SELF, 

anent Perkin Warbeck, as to the virtue (?) of Mary Queen 
of Scots, as to the meaning of the last word of Charles I., 
"Remember," as to who wrote Junius, and as to Lord 
Byron's most drecidful story, upon which, as Doctor Lushing- 
ton, dying lately, made no sign, there wdll every now and 
then arise a doubt. In each of these cases silence was by 
no means golden. 

The grumblers are a widely different race compared to 
the silent. They are eloquent persons, whose rhetoric is 
generally employed in telling the world of their o^vn wrongs. 
And it is astonishing how small these Avrongs are, what 
atoms magnified, and what out-of-the-way things a man will 
grumble about. Let us own readily enough that it is man 
who is the chief grumbler, and that his troubles are often of 
the smallest ; and it by no means follows that the man who 
cries out the loudest is the most hurt. Nor with the habitual 
grumbler or the hypochondriac has the fact that the troubles 
complained of do not properly belong to him anything to do 
with it. When Sterne met poor sick Doctor Smollett on his 
travels, the author of Roderick Random was in a bad 
humour with the world, in failing health, much troubled 
with many cares, and it suited Sterne to picture him as 
"Smelfungus" — for Smollett had been a critic, and such 
persons have few friends. " Smelfungus," says Sterne, " had 
been the grand tour, and had seen nothing to admire ; all 
was barren from Dan to Beersheba ; and when I met him 



DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING. 121 

he fell foul of the Venus de Medici, and abused her lady- 
ship like a common fish-fag. ' I will tell it,' cried he — ' I 
will tell it to the world!' 'You had better,' said Sterne, 
with caustic bitterness, 'tell it to your physician.'" Now, 
what had the Venus de Medici to do with the grumbler? 
He saw little beauty in her, and all the world saw a great 
deal. Why, then, trouble about the matter? A wise man 
would have been silent, but every small hair frets and 
irritates a too sensitive skin. If we really confined our 
own thoughts to what concerned us, or would without 
doubt benefit others, we should have little to grumble at — 
that is, if it were possible to a grumbler to regard anything 
as little or great. On the contrary, such a one would put a 
drop of the clearest water beneath a microscope, and find 
something in it to grumble at ; or he would grumble because 
his hair was dark and not light, or vice versa^ or because he 
was not an inch taller or shorter. King Alphonso of 
Castile is said to have grumbled because God Almighty 
did not consult him when he made man, and has left it on 
record that if He had done so we should have had many 
things altered for the better. 

So universal is the practice, that it has been more than 
once said that, if half-a-dozen men — Englishmen of course — 
are found seated comfortably together in their club window 
in Pall Mall, or behind the red-latticed window of a public 
house, and they seem quiet and cozy, one may assert, without 



122 THE BETTER SELF. 

fear of contradiction, that they are grumbling. In five cases 
out of ten, perhaps, when WilHam talks confidentially to his 
Mary between whiffs of his cigar, or after tea with his pipe, 
he is also grinding away at that Englishman's organ, a 
grumble. He is unfolding for the hundredth time to that 
sweet and matronly bosom the fact that the world has not 
done half as well by him as it has by Tom and George, who 
came out of the same nest as he did, or hailed from the same 
county. "And you, my dear," he will say, throwing a lump 
of sugar into the bitter cup to stimulate his wife's interest — 
" look at you, and at Brown's wife, and see what she has to 
wear !" 

As a rule — God bless them, for it--the wives sympathize 
with their husband's grumble, and are entirely of opinion 
that their William is a somewhat ill-used man, and has not 
had his deserts. It is very beautiful and natural this, pro- 
vided it does not go too far. It makes man and wife more 
friendly, and knits them together; and it may be said safely 
enough that a man's wife really knows more of his merits than 
anybody else, how patient.ly he has worked, how good, clever, 
and suggestive he is, how upright and honourable. The 
fault of the matter is that in the matrimonial grumble, women 
sometimes forget that the man they admire is perhaps not 
one generally liked. As a rule, it generally strikes us, and 
our wives too, that Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson have 
been amply rewarded, and that Fortune has passed over our 



DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING. 123 

heads alone. If they have failed, we know why; if they get 
into a mess, they deserve it; if they achieve fame and a 
fortune, we wonder at their "luck." But what we grumble 
at is, that they do it and not we ; and, on the other hand — 
happy and beautiful thought! — they look over on our side 
of the hedge, and grumble, perhaps, because their potatoes 
are not coming up so well as ours. At the same time, it is, 
as has been frequently remarked, astonishing how easily we 
bear any misfortune that may happen to Jones — which is, 
indeed, only paralleled by the ease with which Jones bears 
that which happens to us. We have been told that it is 
somewhat cruel to beat a cripple with his own crutches, but 
it is what we all do when we say to a man who has fallen, 
"Ah, I told you so ; I thought you would drop !" We never 
grumble when Brown falls and breaks his leg, except he 
should be carrying a basket of our eggs; but we are much 
concerned, and take a turn at our domestic organ, if any 
person treads, even lightly, on our toe. 

The men who grumble belong to every class, and 
generally, the more a man has the more discontent he shows. 
He is higher up the ladder, and sees more of the view, and 
still struggles to get at that which is beyond ; while those on 
the ground seem to be well content if they can ever get a 
ghmpse of the landscape. Hence it is that there is more 
real content among the poor than among the rich; indeed — 

** Poor and content is rich, and rich enough." 



124 THE BETTER SELF. 

But, of all grumblers, the ambitious man in a high position, 
and with really great talents, is — if he be not a philosophic 
angel — the greatest grumbler. We must remember that it 
was Alexander the Great who cried because he had no more 
worlds to conquer, and Hannibal who rushed over the Alps 
and fell upon Italy when he could have more securely de- 
fended his country at home. So, in our time, our captains 
and military men, our clergymen and authors, and even our 
musicians and painters, are great grumblers. And so it is 
with all men whose labour is hard but spasmodic, and who 
have leisure to think. Add to this, that the people of whom 
we write belong to professions where the idea of promotion 
is held out pretty fairly and pretty constantly. The clergy- 
man flatters himself that he would be more useful in a 
certain sphere ; the military man, that if he only had a chance 
he could win battles, and have, like Nelson, a Gazette to 
himself; the painter, musician, and author, ask why their 
works are not appreciated as well as those of their fellows — 
why they are not "hung on the line," or, after working for 
many years, why they may not preach to the world from 
the columns of the Times or the Quarterly Review^ as from 
those of the Little Pedlingion Gazette. Perhaps we ought 
to honour this kind of grumbling; we cannot have zeal 
without it. Man is not yet an angel, and unless he takes 
interest in what he does, what he does will not be worth 
having. And, after all, a gentle continuous grumble is an 



DISCONTENT AND GRUMBLING. 125 

occupation to an active mind, and Is not so very unpleasant. 
Let the grumbler keep himself within bounds, and we shall 
be content to listen to him ; for a man is always seen at his 
best when mounted on a pyramid of his own wrongs. Even 
poor little Hodge and Ginx's Baby tell their sombre stories 
with a certain amount of pleasure to us when they feel that 
the stagnant pool of their lives has been stirred by a good 
grumble. But the boundless, constant grumbler Is generally 
a braggadocio, and too frequently a nuisance, who should 
be preached at by a raw curate until he has confessed to 
his weakness and done penance — O- the silent sort — for his 
wicked discontent 



126 THE BETTER SELF. 



XII. 

THE LUXURY OF WOE. 

How is it that woman so often takes refuge in tears, and 
assuages her grief with a good fit of crying, and man holds 
it to be a shame to be seen to weep ? How is it, again — for 
on some subjects we can put a century of questions — that 
woman gains beauty by that which distorts the face, and 
assumes a power by that which is held to be a weakness ? 
How is it, again, that in theatres, where the business of 
gaily dressed actors is to excite emotion and to practise 
their powers upon our feehngs, we men who go purposely to 
see a tragedy, to be terrified, appalled, touched with tender 
grief, yet deny ourselves the pleasure of weeping, and are 
ashamed if the tears rise to our eyes ? We laugh as much 
as we like, and crow like babies, or " guffaw " like baboons 
at a silly, stupid farce; but we are aehamed, at least the 
majority of us, at crying. And yet he who can feel joy or 
merriment, and not grief, is but an imperfect being. Unless 
he can run up and down the whole gamut of feeling, he is 
little worth: he is an imperfect man. It is just as natural to 



X THE LUXURY OF WOE. 127 

exhibit grief as to exhibit joy. But a long time ago poets 
felt tears to be a weapon of woman only, and sentimental 
poets have found it necessary to apologize for the soldier 
who, bidding good-bye to the scenes of his childhood, "leans 
upon his sword and wipes away a tear." 

There can, however, be but little doubt that women 
love tears much more than men, and this they do naturally, 
and without calling for any aid from fashion. Madame de 
Flahaut, writing of people in high life, says that "there are 
certain women who have so explored the emotional that they 
rather love to nurse a misery than to enjoy a tranquil situa- 
tion;" and Dickens, writing of low life, has pictured, with 
admirable fidelity, a certain Mrs. Gummidge, a "lone, lorn 
widow," who is always weeping and referring to her lost 
husband, and indulging in the luxury of woe. Of course, 
such a woman only exhibits her selfishness; but such women 
care little about thai. If they can only persuade the world 
that they are patterns of constancy they are delighted, and in 
doing so they at least gain a pleasing sensation of their own 
trouble, of the enormity of their sorrow, and feel indeed a 
singular pride in being so unhappy. It is very possible that 
much of the feeling may at first be real; but time, which to 
all natural people brings the gentle anodyne of forgetfulness, 
has no effect upon them. They nurse their sorrow, and are 
always ready to call up their wrongs in a manner which to 
us seems unwise and unwomanly. When a woman is left 



128 THE BETTER SELF. ' 

r a widow we all of us know that she has a sorrow greater 
than a widower has.' Unprotected, lonely, without the aid 
she looks for, without the manly voice to cheer her, the 
judgment to direct her, the strong, manly arm to help, and 
the brave, open sense of man to put things right, and to face 
the difficulties of a cruel world, — the woman must feel all 
this. The better wife, and the better loved wife, she has 
been, the greater will be her intensity of feeling; but it 
should follow that the more she feels this, the less open expres- 
sion she will give to it. The woman who is always referring 
to her loss, takes out of the world her payment and her 
consolation for that loss. Whatever her station in this 
world, she has duties to perform, and she should confine 
her grief to her chamber, and seek her consolation from 
Heaven. If she neglects these merely to keep herself for 
ever in weeds, and continually to parade her grief before the 
world, we may depend upon it that the world will doubt 
her grief and question the source of those tears which are 
so prominently and even theatrically kept flowing. 

And truly the world has some reason to doubt Very 
few of us like soitow, and some people think its exhibition 
an impertinence. Montaigne was of this opinion. "I 
neither like it in myself," says he, " nor admire it in others ; 
and yet generally the world is pleased to honour it with a 
particular esteem, endeavouring to make us believe that 
wisdom, virtue, and conscience shroud themselves under 



THE LUXURY OF WOE. 129 

this grave and affected appearance." This may be so with 
the French, who are fond of sentimental sorrow and tears, 
but it certainly is not so with us, externally a graver, but 
mentally a much merrier and more humorous people. 
Tears also seem to be more easy and natural with Celtic 
nations — indeed, with any who are easily excited to laughter, 
and are subject to sudden fits of depression; but that there 
is always something conscientious or honourable in them, 
our notions forbid us to think. With two grave and warlike 
peoples, the Greeks and Romans ; with the Danes and the 
Teutons; and especially so with the tribes of the North 
American Indians, it was considered a mark of effeminacy 
and worthlessness for a man to cry. 

Moreovc, it must be borne in mind that tears are as 
a rule no great proof of deep feeling. Actually, they are 
an expression of the subsidence of the extreme emotion ; 
and this is very finely illustrated in Tennyson's plaintive 
ballad, ^^ Home they brought her warrior dead." The wife 
is struck speechless, motionless, with sorrow; and the cry 
is that she must weep or she will die, and at last the tears 
are brought forth in this wise : — 

** Rose a nurse of ninety yeai-s, 
Set his child upon her knee- 
Like summer tempest came her tears— 
* Sweet, my child, I live for thee ! ' ** 

Not only do physiologists know this well, but the poets, 

K 



I30 THE BETTER SELF. 

who know nature by intuition, have long since told it to 
the world. ^^ Light cares speak out ; the stronger ones are 
dumb," says the Latin proverb, in a line of Catullus ; and 
the poets feign that the miserable mother, Niobe, having 
occasioned the anger of Apollo, had seven sons, and as 
many daughters, slain by the arrows of the sun-god ; and 
thereon, hardened by woes, a statue of despair, turned into 
stone. " In a battle near Buda," says Montaigne, who is 
determined that the Grecian mythology shall not alone 
tell the sad stories, " a knight was particularly taken notice 
of for his singularly gallant bearing in an encounter. He 
was unknown, but performed great deeds of valour, and 
was highly commended by all, and lamented when left 
dead on the spot, but by none more than by a German 
count, who was infinitely enamoured of so rare a valour. 
The body was brought off, and the count, with the common 
curiosity, came to view it ; and the armour was no sooner 
taken off than he knew the dead man to be his own son — 
a thing that added a second blow to the compassion of all 
beholders ; he only, without uttering a word, or taking 
away his eyes, stood fixedly contemplating the body, till, 
the vehemence of sorrow having overcome his spirit, he 
sank down stone dead to the ground." 

This is a beautiful story, and it is simply told ; it speaks 
of a grief far " too deep for tears," an emotion which 
"whispered the o'er-fraught heart and bade it break," a 1 



THE LUXURY OF WOE. 131 

sorrow which was silent in its intense depth, and deep in 
its silence. It is doubtful whether women often feel such 
strong sorrow ; if they" do, it of course kills them ; but 
Nature seems to have given them a nervous system which, 
being more easily acted upon, more readily relieves them. 
Tears are at any rate to be looked on, not as proofs of very 
deep, or rather of the deepest, grief, but as a gracious relief 
from the killing intensity of such grief 

/ Some women can cry whenever they desire to do so, 
and make use of tears as an engine of great powerJ But 
Madame de Stael thinks, and wisely too, that "it is a 
question, whether women are not wrong to work upon men 
by their tears, and thus, as it were, to make strength the 
slave of weakness ; " but she adds that " where they do 
not fear to employ that means, they almost always succeed 
— at least for a time.'' 

Yet, surely it is only for a time that men are conquered 
by weakness. That they do not care to see grief openly 
expressed is a common fault — a fault owned by very brave 
men, who, for the most part, are tender-hearted. When 
grief is open and loud, half the men who witness it will 
do all they can to assuage it, as beggars and certain rogues 
well know, who train up children to drop a box of lucifer 
matches, and then to cry at the loss. Eagerly the good- 
natured citizen gives his penny to make good the wretched 
stock-in-trade ; but he is not oiten thus to be taken in^ A 



133 THE BETTER SELF. 

too easily crying woman, one who is always as ready to melt 
as a lump of salt in a shower of rain or a ball of snow in 
the sunshine, a sound man rightly detests. He thinks that, 
although poets speak with rapture of the tear, and Lord 

Byron writes — 

** So bright the tear in Beauty's eye 
Love half regrets to kiss it dry," 

it loses all its charm in frequent repetition. And that 
kissing away of tears, too, a Briton would hold to be a very 
simple folly and unmanly weakness, while a Frenchman 
will rave at beauty's tears. " Ciel!^^ cries Alphonse, ^'^ des 
larmes!^^ And he cries himself, slaps his pale forehead, 
and kisses away the salt drops as if they were nectar ; while 
the English sailor, feeling just as and even more deeply than 
the French lover, cries out that he should only "like to 
catch his lee scuppers running over." This emotionalism 
seems natural to the French. Madame de Sevigne, writing 
to her daughter, describes the death of the hero, Marshal 
Turenne, from an eye witness : " Shot down, the hero 
opened two great eyes twice, and then his mouth, and 
then shut them for ever. His captains round him cried 
and wept, and the little d'Elboeuf threw himself on the 
body in an agony of tears, and fainted with crying. . . 
They carried the body to a coach, and then to his tent; 
and it was there that M. de Lorges, M. de Roye, and many 
others, thought that they would die with weeping." No 



THE LUXURY OF WOE. 133 

doabt the great man was beloved; but surely the silent 
grief felt by English soldiers at the deaths of Sir Philip 
Sidney, of Sir John Moore, and of Picton, is more to be 
commended ; at any rate, it is more natural to us. To 
the Americans, on the contrary — a great people, who seem 
to have acquired much of the vivacity of the French, and 
to adopt their fashions, as if they were impelled by climate 
to be nearer to the Gaul than the Briton — that easiness of 
crying, that fatal facility of tears, seems natural. When 
Mr. (afterwards General) Sickles was tried for the murder 
of his wife's suspected paramour, although there was neither 
doubt on the part of the jury, nor denial on that of the 
accused, he was acquitted by a jury so impressed by the 
fervid and ad captandum eloquence of the counsel, that they 
all burst into tears ; and the emotion was so catching, that 
the reporters say there was not a dry eye in the court. This 
may have been pity, but certainly it was not law. The 
ancients, who forbade sensational appeals, and especially the 
appearance of a woman in tears before the tribunal, were 
quite right. In our courts, all one-sided expression of feeling 
is rigidly forbidden. Justice should be calm, and blinded 
with her bandage : certainly it is not graceful for her to be 
seen with a tear in her eye. 

The value or the worth of tears, then, has to be weighed, 
as does everything in this world. We see that women shed 
them more easily than men, and certain nations more easily 



134 THE BETTER SELF, 

than others. One man thinks it a proof of cowardice, 
another a luxury, to indulge in woe. One man emotionally 
excited even by wine will weakly pity himself till he is 
*^ crying drunk ; " another, with a dull determination, will 
speak of his wrongs without emotion, or with merely a 
dumb grumble. Some women will use tears as an engine 
of power, will weep over their sick cat, their lap-dog, their 
bird, their own petty losses; others reserve their tears to 
assuage deep griefs. As a rule, very soft hearts are, if one 
goes a little further with them, very selfish hearts, and are 
easily moved, as a shallow stream is easily rippled by the 
wind; but they are not deep enough to be dangerous. Still, 
there is a grief 

** which bums 

Worse than tears drown," 

says Shakspere ; and another of his characters says man- 
fully, " Weep I cannot, but my heart bleeds." Ovid, who 
has given us more axioms than most other poets, says 
pointedly that tears, at times, have all the weight of words ; 
yet, as a rule, a man had better look upon tears scientifically 
— as a natural safety-valve given us to prevent any danger of 
explosion. Give Grief words, let her speak loudly, and all 
will be well. The silent sorrow kills. The baby who will 
not cry chokes itself with its passion; he who baw^Js loudly 
improves his lungs and grows stronger. Long before chloro- 
form, or any of those anaesthetics which have been dis- 



THE LUXURY OF WOE. 



135 



covered and given to the world, those pain-destroyers which 
make the surgeon's art not naif so dreadful as it was, the 
doctors used to tell the men to cry out under the knife, for 
Nature in this expression had given man a way out of his 
pain, and an anodyne which some say is better than any 
drug in the world. Thus one torment banishes another; and 
thus God, mindful of man's weakness, gives him the tear 
which heals his sorrow, while it softens his fellow's heart 



LIBRARY 
N0V14 1899 

.DEPTOFlH£i;MiOR.j 



136 THE BETTER SELF. 



XIII, 

GRIEVANCES. 

To over delicate feelings there naturally fall a number 
of troubles duller persons usually escape — they are so 
sensitive ; moreover, this is an age of grievances and of 
strikes. We are each of us so badly oif that our burdens 
have worn quite " a hole in our back." There never was 
an age half so badly used. Our fathers and mothers never 
went through a quarter of our troubles. As for our grand- 
fathers and grandmothers, they lived in a paradise of fine 
gentlemen and ladies, balls, routs, drums, and all that 
made life sweet. And really, if we look at the portraits 
by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough, and mark the 
placid faces and unruffled minds therein shown, we shall be 
inclined to agree with the grumblers of the present day. 

The world is full of unquiet souls. We are all something 
like Blanche Amory in Mr. Thackeray's " Pendennis," 
who chronicles her woes in a little volume entitled " Mes 
Larmes ! " and we exclaim with that aifected young lady, 



GRIEVANCES. 137 

^^ II faiit avoir des emotions.'*^ So that, as an exquisitely 
adjusted balance must swing evenly from one side to 
another, we may presume that the soul of man, if it does 
not break out in gratitude, will do so in complaint. No 
class is free from this plague ; and really it would seem as if 
our education had of late years omitted to instil endurance. 
^'Endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ "is 
a text which has given way to the more worldly apophthegm, 
" Grumble and get on.'' From the top of the tree to the 
bottom, there is much the same cry : the private wishes to 
be an officer, the subaltern a captain, the captain a general. 
Perhaps there is not a class in the world so thoroughly 
dissatisfied as military and naval officers. They thrive best, 
of course, in war, and — small blame to them ! — are pleased 
when men of peace are dismayed. It was a well-known 
hackneyed toast at Indian mess-tables when John Company 
held sway — " A bloody war or the yellow fever." Either 
one or the other might carry off the colonel, the major, or 
perhaps a senior captain or two. It is to be concluded that 
young officers vociferously applauded; while the seniors, 
who had weakened constitutions and had gained their 
*''- steps," did not rap the table so heartily. 

Let us " go downstairs " like Socrates, and see whether 
we can meet with more wisdom. These young soldiers 
have had their places won for them by their fathers' work, 
and are thoughtless : still, they are generous enough to 



138 THE BETTER SELF. 

share both the war and the fever when they come; but 
we shall find more wisdom with the workmen. They, 
we know, have their grievances. They call themselves 
^Svorking-men," as if no one else worked. They have 
Unions to protect them, and combine together under the 
very shadow of the laws they too often set at defiance. 
They have a congress at Sheffield ; and thereat, on Satur- 
day, January. 17th, 1874, they passed this resolution: — 
^'The Congress is clearly of opinion that the Imperial 
revenues ought to be raised by direct levy on the annual 
value of realized property." Was there ever a more 
iniquitous proposal? A, a plasterer, saves his money and 
buys a house or land, or puts his money in a bank; B, 
a carpenter, earns twice as much, but does not save, and 
spends all his income. A is to pay all the taxes, and B 
none ! Or, to illustrate it in another way, C, a clergyman's 
widow, lives on the savings of a lifetime : she has JQ2Q0 a 
year. E, a literary Bohemian who has much talent, but 
also much laziness, dawdles away half his time, managing, 
however, to secure about treble the sum annually, which 
he spends on himself, his club, cigars, and drink. But 
the widow is to pay the taxes, and E to pay nothing ! Still, 
we must not be too severe on our friends ; it is a great 
step in their education that they own there should be an 
" Imperial " system at all. 

Victor Hugo, in his " Annee Terrible," a poem on the 



GRIEVANCES. i>9 

year in which Paris was burnt, hits upon one of the reasons 
of the grievances of the lowest classes. Going along the 
street during the second terrible siege, the aged poet meets 
with a Communist, who informs him that he has just set 
fire to the National Library. ^^ What ! " cries the poet ; 
^' Burn Homer and Plato and Socrates; burn all the 
historians and poets — those who have given men wider 
hopes and better lives — those w^ho have made discoveries 
and perished for liberty ! What ! Burn Galileo and Newton 
and Kepler, to whom the world owes science and so many 
discoveries ! Burn those who make life merry and good 
— burn Rabelais, Moliere, Lesage — burn Racine and 
Shakspere — burn the preachers and moralists, and finally 
burn the Bible itself ! Wretch, what have you done ! " 
The man answers with a grin and an epigram, ''' Je ne sais 
pas lire I ^^ — "I don't know how to read!'' What could 
he know of the wide heritage of knowledge open to the 
poorest scholar? It is ignorance, after all, that gives 
point to our grievances and our grumblings. We complain 
that we have missed that fortune, lost that suit, have been 
made miserable by that failure. Did we know all, each of 
these troubles might prove to be a blessing in disguise. 
Wisdom and reflection w411 take the sharpest sting from 
our troubles if Ave only employ them. 

But, allowing that education will scatter and disperse, 
as it has already done, many grievances, it must be first 



HO THE BETTER SELF. 

conceded that the education needs to be religious and 
moral. To give a selfish and corrupt heart more knowledge 
is to give it more power to be mischievous. The small 
scholars who learn the rights of men must also learn their 
duties. The secularists who would banish such teachings 
are not reformers — they are revolutionists. That Mr. Bright 
has a grievance against England is very well known, but it 
is not so well known why. He has also an immense 
admiration for America; and he seems to regard most 
things done by England as wrong, and most things done 
or said against her as right. The Ashantee war is barbarous 
upon our part ; and — hear this, ye who understand what 
the native savage African is — a creature of low intellect, 
used to surprises, stratagems, and lies all his life — Mr. Bright 
seriously proposes that we should employ ^' arbitration — say, 
as an arbitrator, the King of Holland " — between Ashantee 
and England ! Well, we succeeded wonderfully in our 
other arbitration — we had to pay three millions because we 
believed a President's proclamation that certain American 
States were belligerents. The Geneva Arbitration estab- 
lished the fact that as yet States are not advanced enough 
for such a method of settling international differences. 
Does any one suppose that France and Germany would 
have submitted their quarrel to arbitration? Would 
America, in her quarrel with Spain about Cuba and the 
"Virginius," be arbitrated for? Do Mr. Bright and others 



GRIEVANCES. 141 

like him give unpalatable advice on purpose to quarrel 
with those who will not accept it ? 

As a general rule, we should advise persons to distrust, 
utterly irrespective of political considerations, all those, 
whether Tory, Whig, or Radical, who have a grievance 
against their country or their family. If they are not well 
there, they must be very unlucky, or they must be in 
fault. If they are unlucky, we are worldly enough to 
advise peaceable persons not to deal with them. And 
what is one's country but one's family ? And, if we malign 
that, what are we ? 

* ** Breathes there the man with soul so deact 
Who never to himself hath said, 
^ This is my own, my native land ? '* 

Is there any Englishman who does not love his land, ay, 
and trust her too ? 

Then w^hy malign her? With Mr. Arch travelling to 
Canada (Britain's eldest daughter and best representative), 
and telling English peasants what has been told them for 
twenty years — that, in ten cases out of the dozen, th ; 
are best off at home- — with the experience of the Brazil 
emigrants before us, and of Mr. Dickens, and the deadly 
SAvamp he pictures in America — why should "our friends 
with a grievance " always abuse England ? Why should 
the working-men, whose masters and whose masters' fathers 
are and were workers, talk about oppression, and that men 



142 THE BETTER SELF. 

cannot rise in this country? Why should these old lies 
repainted have power to move our English folk ? Simply 
because lies will have power; they sift and stir men, and 
the bad ones yield. Tw^o men, very 'different, and of 
different creeds, gave utterance to two opinions which 
meant the same thing, and which it is well sometimes to 
remember. Mr. Caleb Gushing is credited with formulating 
in America the smart phrase, "Our country, right or wrong;" 
and Lord Denbigh, as is well known, said, "An Englishman, 
if you please ; but, before all things, a [Roman] Catholic.'^ 
Opposite as the expressions appear, they mean the same 
thing : they mean loyalty to the ship one sails in — don't 
scuttle that. We agree to the spirit of them with our 
whole heart. If one does not stick by one's home, one's 
hearth, one's country, to whom will one be true? To 
whom is one's tongue to be gracious, if it is constantly 
exposing the weakness of one's own mother? For our- 
selves, we are weak enough to be proud of being a Briton ; 
and, if any one will find out that " brither Scot " who, 
when in Canada, imported some of his native turf, a mat 
for his feet, and a seat for his chair, and, sitting down, 
drank ;eal Glenlivat to the old land, and felt his heart 
glow, because he was on his native soil, we wull exchange 
photographs and " embrace " as brothers. 

The best excuse for the grumblers is to suppose that 
they are out of health, and that the vile melancholia^ or 



GRIEVANCES. 143 

black bile, of which old Burton has treated, is the source 
of their ill-tempers. In perhaps eight cases out of tci, this 
charitable supposition is the true one. In a young ladies' 
school, superintended by one who knew a little of medicine, 
the young people who were not quick and smart with their 
lessons were stimulated with a dose of Gregory's powder — 
this we know as a fact — and improved health produced 
improved attention. It is well known, also, that John 
Dryden, who sat down to write tragedies in his best dress, 
prepared himself by a dose or so of medicine on the 
previous day. Another writer attributed his atheistic and 
discontented ideas to an undigested mutton chop. Putting 
these things together, we may endeavour to banish some 
of our grievances by keeping in sound health. We may 
send others flying by being prudent and wise. Personally, 
we seldom feel so bitterly ill-tempered as when we have 
done a foolish thing ; and others, no doubt, are like us. 

Again, if we want to be successful and manly, and 
pleasant in life, when we have a grievance we must treat it 
as a weed, and pull it up. Great men do not Jiave them. 
'' What a crying shame it was," said Hazlitt, " that Milton 
got only thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence for 
'Paradise Lost.' " " Not at all," answered Northcote ; " he 
did not write it for money. He had gained what he pro- 
posed by writing it — not thirteen pounds nine shillings and 
sixpence, but an immortal reputation." That answer of the 



144 THE BETTER SELF. 

great artist was a noble one. "They don't ask you out," 
said an acquaintance to Dr. Johnson, " these great lords 
and ladies, like they do David Garrick." " No," said 
Johnson ; " they don't like their mouths stopped, for they 
are great lords and ladies ; besides, Davie amuses them.'' 
Here is the truth roughly told, but all the more poignant. 
When one can amuse in society, one can count upon being 
popular, and upon being " asked out." Who dined out so 
much as Sydney Smith, Tom Moore, and Theodore Hook ? 
And why? Because they were the most brilliant men of 
the day, and a dinner-party was not a success without them. 
Sydney Smith's widow kept away from society long after her 
husband's death ; at last she ventured. " How different it 
was ! " she writes. " I could not believe a dinner could 
have been so dull." 

f Men and women, too, receive in this life much of what 
they deserve. It is like a looking-glass, this big world ; 
grin and smile to it, and it will smile back — scowl, and it 
scowls."^ It is but a confession of one's own unpleasantness 
at home if we air our grievances. The nice people are not 
'^ nice " without a good deal of trouble on their part. That 
pleasant fellow who always cheers his acquaintances, and 
who carries an atmosphere of good nature about him, is 
probably a hero in his way, and most likely a good-natured 
philosopher, who takes a great deal of trouble to be what he 
is. That amiable sister, who never complains, has shown 



GRIEVANCES. 145 

in little things as much bravery as if she had won the 
Victoria Cross. 

fOri the other hand, those young persons who have always 
a budget of miseries to pour into the sympathetic ears of 
their friends, and who are totally, if they are to be believed, 
unappreciated at home, will be found, if looked into, not 
so amiable as they might beA ■ Mr. Tom Pinch, who never 
thought of himself, found even the gross hypocrite Pecksniff 
a good and kindly creature ; while Martin Chuzzlewit, who 
took care to sit in the very front of the fire, and liked 
to be read to sleep by Tom, discovered every one to be 
selfish. Depend upon it, if we try to think more of others 
than we do of ourselves, we shall seldom have a grievance. 
We may also rest assured that, if we ^vill dwell upon our 
sweet selves, and our own merits, we shall doubtless believe 
those merits to be so great that we shall find the world 
will always supply an immense and ever-increasing griev- 
ance by being blind to them. 



146 THE BETTER SELF, 



XIV. 

DELICATE FEELINGS, 

r 

Very sensitive persons are often very selfish, and very 
selfish persons are not unfi-equently quite blind to their 
own defects/'-i^ It is usual for them to deprecate any appeal 
to or any attack upon their feelings, and they talk as if 
many things done in life were done purposely to upset 
the delicate organisation they refer to. Sometimes this 
-^ sdfishness is very apparent, and the persons around are 
satisfied that there is a good deal of latent hypocrisy, or 
what the world succinctly terms humbug, conjoined to it. 
The reader will remember that the rogue Autolycus, in 
the Wmter^s Tale, thus appeals to his delicate and noble 
sensibility, in order merely to conceal for a time his 
robbery; for, after he has picked the clown's pocket as 
he lies grovelling on the ground and pretending to be 
wounded, he rejects any offer of money. " Dost lack any 
money? I have a little money for thee," says the clown, 
about to put his hand in his pocket. But Autolycus at 
once catches his hand and whines out, ^*No, good sweet 



DELICA TE FEELINGS. 147 

sir; no, I beseech you, sir; I have a kinsman not past 
three quarters of a mile hence, unto whom I was going : 
I shall there have money or anything I want. Offer me 
no money, I pray you ; that kills my heart." This appeal 
to the finer feelings of the clown effectually blinds him, 
and he does not discover his loss till the rogue has long 
gone out of sight. 

Similar cajolery Is practised every day. There is hardly 
a day passes but that one may see in the newspapers some 
appeal to the benevolent, wherein it is stated that a lady 
of high birth, an officer, or a clergyman, who dares not 
make her or his case known, has fallen into misfortune, 
and who desires to be relieved in a manner that will not 
"kill the heart," i.e.^ hurt the feelings. By appealing to 
the mercy and compassion of the world — and the world 
has much more than many of us give it credit for — such 
persons get frequent and sometimes munificent relief. The 
Duke of Wellington, amongst his secret good deeds, which 
were numerous, once relieved " an officer's daughter," as 
she represented herself, for a series of five years. He made 
inquiries, but, though he never saw the lady, the plot was 
so cunningly laid that all suspicions were lulled, until at 
length, just as he was about to send her five pounds, as 
she said she was going into a hospital with a broken leg, 
the mendicity officer, having got hold of one of the Duke's 
letters, discovered that the "officer's daughter" was a man, 



148 THE BETTER SELF. 

a practised begging-letter writer. To what extent the Duke 
had been played upon he never would confess ; but he 
often laughed heartily at the thoroughness of the deception, 
although he was very angry with the impostor at the time. 

Really good and charitable people have work enough, 
if they are rich, for an almoner ; and the public has need 
indeed to protect its feelings, and, to prevent the robbery 
by rogues, good reason to support a " Charity Organisation '' 
as well as a " Mendicity Society." The feeling of pity, if 
indulged indiscriminately and loosely, is a very expensive 
one to a generous man, and miserably harmful to the 
recipient of his charity. It is all very well to act the good 
Samaritan, but we who are told to be "wise as serpents'' 
as well as " harmless as doves," should remember that the 
original good Samaritan, when he found his neighbour 
wounded and plundered, did not content himself with 
dropping his twopence into the half-closed hand, but 
bound up the poor sufferer's wounds, placed him on his 
own beast, took him to a place of refuge, and provided 
for him till he was well. " Many persons who love to 
indulge sentimental feelings only are," as Sydney Smith 
said with a sneer, " very ready to act the good Samaritan, 
but ' without the oil and the twopence.' " 

There are some persons who indulge their feelings at 
others' expense, and who pity the convict when convicted 
and punished, quite putting out of sight the righteousness 



DELICATE FEELINGS. 149 

of his sentence and the enormity of his crime. , We find 
many of these philanthropists everywhere. Recently a 
woman in America, to w^hom a brutal murder and many 
other crimes were brought directly home, was acquitted 
by a jury and dismissed with a compliment. In our own 
country women who have made it their business to poison 
families by wholesale, or to kill a dozen children at least 
while carrying on a baby farm, have been j arioned — as 
to the extreme sentence — and maintained comfortably for 
life ; and even while we write, two gentlerjien of extremely 
liberal opinions — Mr. Jacob Bright and Mr. P. A. Taylor, 
the latter a prominent advocate of women's rights — have 
made themselves conspicuous by advocating the abolition 
of the recently imposed Act which permits the flogging 
in gaol of garotters and of all who use personal violence 
in highway robbery. Of all assaults — on account of its 
roughness, its brutality, its cruel results, and its cowardice 
— that of the garotte^ or strangulation on the highway, is 
the most cruel, except perhaps that of deliberately kicking 
one's prostrate antagonist to death with shoes armed with 
tips purposely prepared. Its effect on the nerves is so 
serious that very many of the victims have died, and very 
many have been rendered invalids for life. One poor 
man whom we knew died, and the state in which he was 
brought home gave his wife such a shock, that she also 
succumbed, leaving two helpless orphans. The only 



ISO THE BETTER SELF. 

effective way to lesson these assaults was found to be 
the flogging of garotters under the superintendence of a 
surgeon, who, if they could not bear the lash and fainted, 
immediately stopped the punishment. But our philan- 
thropists find the description even of such punishment 
too much for their feelings, and plead for the subjects 
of it : such treatment brutalises them. Brutalises them, 
forsooth 1 As if a professional garotter, who watches a 
poor man till he comes to a dark corner, and then twists 
a gutta-percha switch round his throat, could be brutalised ! 
That the punishment is an effective deterrent is found in 
the fact that upon the Act being passed such assaults fell 
from forty in a season to four, and have since almost 
stopped. It is not ten years ago since a City tradesman 
invented a garotte collar — a steel apparatus with spikes, 
to prevent the possibility of the wearer being choked; 
yet now we find persons unwise enough to plead for the 
perpetrators of such crimes. We of course respect pity, 
sensibly and well directed, and above all we lament for 
those who fall into crime ; but we must not allow pity, 
any more than any other feeling, to befool us. Our duty 
lies sometimes in the thorny and unpleasant path of severity, 
not altogether to be exercised towards the criminal, but to 
prevent others from being similarly misled through hope of 
escape with impunity, which is the great incentive to crime. 
Amongst the " feelings " which are too often indulged 



DELICA TE FEELINGS. 1 5 1 

in a foolish way are those which we rightly reckon amongst 
the holiest in nature — those of a mother. As the sweetest 
wines make the sharpest vinegar, and from the most brilliant 
exotic flowers are distilled the most potent poisons, so our 
best good often becomes our worst evil; and the foolish 
indulgence of mothers — in nine cases out of ten for the 
sake of mere selfishness, however cunningly concealed 
from themselves — has perhaps done as much evil as any 
other cause — some persons say as all other causes — in 
the world. We remember that Mrs. Kenwigs, in Dickens's 
story, assembled her children, all nicely dressed, ou one 
form for the admiration of her friends and gossips, and 
then burst into tears to '^relieve her feelings," declaring 
that the little snub-nosed creatures were too beautiful to 
live. By that cunning contrivance the lady called the 
attention of her friends to her offspring, and so gratified 
her vanity. The eldest child, Miss Morleena, tried, it will 
also be remembered, the same "little game" on, with a 
difference, by going into hysterics in the baby's chair ; 
but, finding no 'one to attend to her "feelings," she at 
once recovered, and made a violent assault on one of her 
little sisters, as an outlet to other pent-up *^ feelings." 
Here we may ask — unless we quietly console ourselves 
by assuming the " feelings " of women to be often mere 
vain expressions — how are we to account for the fact that 
" hysterics," as they were called, were once a very fashion- 



1 52 THE BETTER SELF. 

able complaint, and that now they are seldom heard of? 
So also with fainting fits, which are marvellously less 
common, according to medical statistics, than they were 
twenty years ago. Some part of the cessation may be 
attributed to the smaller practice of tight-lacing, but a very 
large percentage of the fainting fits must be put down to 
the indulgence of " feelings." 

Mothers who are always ready — as too many are — to 
marry their daughters without forethought, to push forward 
their sons recklessly, to get " any place " for their children, 
and greedily to take the very best, suitable or not, for 
their progeny, to secure the first place, the largest slice 
of cake, and other "goodies," are merely carrying out a 
distilled selfishness ; and while they believe that they are 
exhibiting a mother's self-sacrifice, in reality they are 
merely shifting their method of self-pleasing. Take again 
the too common plea which mothers put forward for 
indulging their children ; self-love tells them that they 
do this through the generosity born of true love, whereas 
what they do arises as much from want of judgment and 
discrimination as from due appreciation of justice. Again, 
many a mother, instead of properly punishing a child at 
the time of wrong-doing, refers all the unpleasant part of 
domestic rule to the father, who thus becomes the domestic 
tyrant, while the mother is looked upon as a pitying angel, 
her soft folly undoing all the good which the father's pun- 



DELICA TE FEELINGS. 1 53 

ishment might do. So, yet again, mothers believe that 
they are exhibiting the proper *' maternal feelings'' in 
keeping their children at home when they should send 
them forth into the world, where alone they can be 
taught the virtue of self-dependence. As Tennyson wTites, 
in his Gareth and Lynette^ it is simply ruin for an active 
young man to be checked by over-fondness — 

** Prison'd and kept, and coax'd and whistled to— 
Since the good mother holds me still a child, 
Good mother is bad mother unto me ! 
A worse were better I " 

The subject is an unpleasant one to us, and therefore we 
will say no more. The worst of it is, that neither we nor 
any one else will convince a foolish mother that, in pleasing 
her own selfishness, and in ruining her children, she is not 
doing her best, but rather her worst ; and if such a woman 
reads this, she will perhaps think Uie writer " a hard-hearted 
monster " for having dared to say what he has said. 

We have heard a man described as a gentleman because 
his "feelings" would not permit him to carry a parcel, 
nor to work for his living, nor to pay his debts ; the pride 
which suggested to him the propriety of being very well 
dressed, wearing nicely made kid gloves, and a well- 
brushed hat, was left out of sight. Mr. Mantalini was a 
gentleman of this sort ; and there are ladies too who are 
content to starve and live but half a life throughout life, 



154 THE BETTER SELF. 

so that they never do anything menial. Lord Salisbury, 
the other day, referred to this feeling when he assured 
his hearers that, because ladies would not enter into 
lower spheres, the clerk and the curate, the companion 
and the governess, have come to be paid much less 
than the skilled working-man, the mason who builds the 
wall or lays the coping, or the housekeeper who looks 
after one's household, and the cook who prepares one's 
dinner. Lord Salisbury is one who speaks with great 
authority, for he has himself for many years put his 
** feelings '' very wisely in his pocket, and has showui us 
what such a nobleman should show us. Instead of idling 
luxuriously beneath the shadow of a grand title, this 
descendant of William Longswood, Earl of Salisbury, a 
great warrior, and in our heraldry '^a high and mighty 
prince,'^ has been serving on railway boards, proving himself 
a most efficient chairman, so that any great board would be 
happy to bow to his decision, and by a very high salary 
willingly secure his services. For such a long-descended 
nobleman, of as good birth as is the Queen herself, such 
service is as menial as for one true gentlewoman to manage 
the household of another. But of this we will say no more. 
Upon the new continents where our children and cousins 
will move more freely than we do, let us hope that honest 
work will be truly honoured, and that the "professions" 
will not be so much elevated above riditeous trade. 



DELICA TE FEELINGS. 1 55 

It IS a question whether feeh'ngs are natural ; that is, 
whether they arise spontaneously or are received. " We trust 
we have a good conscience in all things," says the apostle, 
with that marvellous spiritual prescience which anticipates the 
knowledge of the most learned. As Sterne has remarked 
in one of his curious and spasmodic sermons, the phrase is 
noticeable. **We trust; surely we know? Nay, hardly so." 
A certain conscience perhaps is inherent; but the conscience 
of the African who would lie and steal from and poison the 
most affectionate of his pastors who had converted him, is 
a very different monitor from the conscience of that good 
missionary. 

The greatest argument in respect of the inherence of 
our feelings may be found perhaps by reference to the lower 
creation. Take, for instance, fear, which is a nervous 
feeHng so general all over the world that we cannot doubt 
but that it is inherent. What we call courage is but an 
absence of fear, and the greatest "braves" among the 
beasts are at the same time the most cowardly. 

/ ** That all men would be cowards if they dare, 
\ Some men have had the courage to declare." 

Courage, friendship, tenderness, maternal affection, revenge, 
anger, hatred, and other feelings may be traced in the 
behaviour of animals. Elephants remember injuries and 
benefits, and will resent the one and reward the other. 



156 THE BETTER SELF. 

Horses and cats form attachments ; and of course dogs are 
not without their feeHngs. It is observable that no dog 
likes to be laughed at ; that he will show anger, remorse, 
and a great nervous disturbance if pointed at and ridiculed, 
and this without mentioning his name. If the name be 
spoken, of course his quick ear catches it : and it is not 
unnatural in the dog that he should watch and mark the 
various tones in w^hich his conduct is debated ; thus the 
wise cur in the comedy, which walked downstairs to avoid 
being kicked down, is quite true to life, and any one may 
see that when a dog is looked at and laughed at he is not 
insensible to ridicule. Neither is he insensible to praise, 
nor in some measure to humour. And certainly what a dog 
feels a man feels. We can all agree with evolution so far, 
and we may each determine to spare the feelings of others 
when we can, and not indulge in them in too great an 
abundance ourselves. ( One of the most unpleasant persons 
in a family is the one we do not know what to do with on 
account of the overplus of " ieeling " she possesses^ 



( iS7 ) 



XV. 

THE PROPER TOUCH. 

What is most wanted by all of us at home and abroad, but 
perhaps most of all at home, is tact. The most skilful man 
will feel at times that he wants it, and the most persuasive 
will, by a moment's forgetfulness, lose a year's hard work. 

This is an old story. Here is an old illustration. King 
Radbod was a most excellent Dane, and of an enthusiastic 
temper; so that whatever he did, he carried with him his 
Court and his nobles — and it is needless to say his people. 
St. Vulfran, who had been sent from the Bishop of Rome, 
had got a footing in that Court, had converted many of the 
nobles, and had so far touched the king that he consented 
to be baptized. Upon a day appointed, therefore, the good 
saint prepared the font, and the king marched into the httle 
church, with its communion table (for they did not dream of 
altars in those days of primitive honesty and simplicity), and 
surrounded by as many courtiers as could well squeeze in, 
he was received with a jubilant hymn by St. Vulfran and his 
missionary friars. 



158 THE BETTER SELF. 

The king, depositing his crown in the hands of his 
attendants, put one foot in the font, and was about to 
accept the holy chrism, when he paused : he had a question 
to ask, and a loyal question too. "Vulfran," said he, "what 
do you say has become of that long line of ancestors of 
mine who ruled in this land before you came with your 
Gospel tidings, and who were never baptized ? " Vulfran, 
a strict believer in regeneration — at that time, indeed, never 
disputed nor mooted — answered hastily : "Assure yourself of 
this, Radbod, that those unbaptized kings were not Christians, 
and are most certain'/ damned." 

Whereupon King Radbod drew his foot out of the font, 

/and placing his crown upon his head, girded on his sword, 

/and proudly swept away, saying: "For my part I would 

/ rather be damned with a long line of kings and warriors, 

I than be saved with a few poor snivelling, shaveling monks." 

\ His courtiers withdrew with him. Vulfran was left with his 

fr aires singing a hymn, and begging for help ; and that 

kingdom and its dependencies, its people and its neighbours, 

were lost for long years to Christianity, and therefore to 

light, civilization, piteousness, good faith, mercy to the poor, 

and all its attendant blessings. It was like putting back 

the sun; for, sooner or later, all lands must come under 

this forerunner of light and knowledge. 

Now what lost Vulfran this kingdom was not truth, for 
it is not true that those who have not heard of Christ are 



THE PROPER TOUCH. 159 

damned ; nay, it is utterly contrary to the spirit of the 
Gospel, and is false. That by which he lost King Radbod 
has cost the Church thousands of souls, — want of tact ; and 
this want is, by anticipation, condemned by the great Head 
of the Church Himself when He says, V" Be ye therefore 
wise as serpents, and harmless as doves :^f and perhaps want 
of tact has been more harmful to religion than anything 
else. People who believe that they are in possession of the 
actual truth, are not to be excused if they make that truth 
unattractive to those who have not arrived at their stand- 
point : even St. Paul rightly prides himself on his tact. He 
was all things to all men : not that he was a hypocrite, or 
ever shunned the truth or feared to declare it ; but he was a 
many-sided man. He felt where othei: men felt ; he put 
himself in their place ; in a word, he knew the proper 
touch; and he knew the value of it. 

And what is tact ? It is a little and important word, 
from the Latin tangere^ to touch. It means a delicacy of 
perception, a knowledge of when a fact is arrived at. A 
good scholar derives the word from the French tacUque^ 
Italian iattica, and the Greek TaKHK-q, tuggu), I place in 
order ; which seems to us to apply more to the word 
" tactics " and its meaning, than to tact Richardson says 
that '' tact is a modern word, frequent in conversation," and 
quoting Lord Macaulay's words^ defines it as " skill or 
adroitness in adapting (one's self) to circumstances, and our 



i6o THE BETTER SELl 

words to our deeds." It is all this, and a great deal more. 
It is the art of putting things adroitly. With tact you may 
with impunity tell the most sensitive person of the most 
terrible misfortune; without tact, such an announcement 
would knock the same person down, as a bullock is felled 
by a pole-axe. With tact a man makes a request for a 
favour, for a loan of money, for a place for his so'\, his 
daughter or his nephew, begs his son-in-law into a living or 
himself into a bishopric, and does all or any of these things 
with such absolute delicacy that he either succeeds, or makes 
the act of denial painful to him who i^erforms it ; without 
tact he muddles everything, he even begs the girl who loves 
him for her hand at the wrong time. He is always out of 
season. He makes a joke when people are exhausted with 
laughter ; he ventures upon a melancholy remark just as 
people are tired of sadness and longing to laugh. TSe is 
fthe person whom Sydney Smith pictures as being himself 
square, and yet being always thrust into round holes. " We 
shall generally find in life," writes Sydney Smith, and it will 
be interesting to put this famous but rarely traced quotation 
rightly before the reader, " that the triangular person has 
got in the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a 
square person has squeezed himself in the round hole. The 
officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom 
fit so exactly that v: • can sl:/ they were almost made for 
each other.*' * 



THE PROPER TOUCH. l6i 

When we can say so, we may be assured that we have 
met a person of much tact, and of course of considerable 
knowledge : for tact consists as much in Art as in Hearty in 
a sensitive good nature, much perception, quickness, vivacity, 
and receptivity. To know what to say, and how and when 
to say it, argues a very considerable grasp of mind. To say 
the wrong thing, and to remember the right thing at the 
wrong time, is a fault of so general a character, that not only 
have Aunt Tabitha Bramble, Mrs. Nickleby, and a dozen 
other characters been built upon it, but in Punch Mr. 
Burnand has been carrying on a series of comic papers 
entirely on this theme, and' these papers have grown into a 
volume which has gone into many editions. The fun of 
these " Happy Thoughts '^ consists in a dull and small- 
minded fellow's having what he considers happy thoughts 
always too late for use, simply because he wants mental 
quickness and tact. He always gets the worst in an argu- 
ment or in a single combat of badinage or chaff; he recol- 
lects the cutting rejoinder he ought to have made when it is 
five minutes too late. Happy thoughts of this sort are as 

useless as those 

*' words congeal' d in Northern air," 

which Butler tells us of in ^^ Hudibras " : a vulgar notion, 
said to be prevalent in his time, that in Greenland words 
were frozen in their utterance ; and upon a thaw, as Chester- 
field has it, "a very mixed and utterly incomprehensible 

M 



i62 THE BETTER SELF. 

speech was heard in the air of all those words set at liberty." 

But of what use was the speech when there was nobody to 

hear it ? 

There are many persons born with tact, and many a 

child in years will prove that he has a very excellent and 

delicate perception. There are a dozen anecdotes to prove 

this ; but the contrary is the rule. Young people are often 

sadly wanting in tact, and are perpetually saying rude things. 

They are the Eiifaris Teri^ibles of Gavarni, who always blurt 

out unseasonable, and sometimes most cruel sayings, one of 

the mildest of which is the reply to the grandfather who, 

patting a favourite grandson's head, says, "Ah, my good 

little boy, there will be something nice for you when I die." 

" Then I wish you'd die at once, grandpa." Old as a man 

may be, he does not like to be at once sent down into the 

damp earth — 

** To lie in cold obstmction, and to rot ; 
This sensible warm motion to become 
A kneaded clod." 

Even from the innocent mouths of babes and sucklings, 
loveable as they are, and much to be indulged, we do not 
like to hear such matter. How many a hatred has had its 
incipience and foundation in a sharp turn given by a child's 
prattle ? 

The tactics of life — by which we fight lifers battle — are by 
far the most important. By them we measure our relative 



THE PROPER TOUCH. 163 

strength, and conquer or fall. We set out, arrange, and put 
in order what we can do and what we can't do. A tactician 
must be a good mathematician ; he knows how to calculate 
distance, strains, and curves, the weight of the burden and 
the strength of the beam. If he is a wise man he never 
enters a battle without knowing it beforehand to be won. It 
was said of the Duke of Wellington that months before the 
Battle of Waterloo he had picked out the field of Mont St. 
Jean and its neighbourhood as the place where the battle 
would be fought. Certain events would force Napoleon to 
move upwards to the north of Europe ; certain others would 
incline his steps that way; he would meet him there. He 
did meet him at the very spot, waited, pretended to be 
caught at the Duchess of Richmond's ball all the time his 
troops were taking up their position, hurried to their head 
just in time, and fought till the very last moment — hours 
after the appointed and proper time — till Bliicher and night 
came. An immense issue hung upon the forecast and the 
tactics of the duke ; but, as he himself said, a good general 
chooses his own battle field. So it has been with all the 
great generals in the world, from the young Alexander to 
Marlborough, who was, perhaps, the finest general the world 
has seen since the Macedonian conqueror, and whose tactics 
were so admirable that he never had to fight a battle twice. 
His opponents were always indisputably beaten and utterly 
scattered by the measures he had taken beforehand. 



I64 THE BETTER SELF. 

Both in tact and tactics a man may overstep himself. In 
the former, it does not so much matter ; it is simply like 
playing with oneself for a guinea, and winning it. Some 
persons use tact where it is not wanted, and then it becomes 
finesse, and ceases to be tact ; some, too, artfully go beyond 
it, on purpose to come back gracefully, like the beau, who 
always re-entered the room on pretence of having left some- 
thing, so that he might have an opportunity of again giving 
his most graceful bow. The Irish are great adepts at this, 
and say a dozen pretty things which apparently begin with 
rudeness : " I am so ill, Kathleen, that I am nearly dead." 
" And indeed I wish you were quite, my lady ; for sure, if 
the body was dead, your soul would be sitting with the 
angels ! " The surprise which such a compliment gives is 
pleasant even to the strongest intellect. This species of 
compliment is perhaps " blarney," but it goes a great way 
for all that. If the Irish were as stable as they are versatile 
and clever, we should not be troubling ourselves so much as 
we always are about that unhappy island. It is true that 
Mr. Huxley declares the English and Irish all to be of the 
same breed ; the natives of Tipperary to be as Teutonic as 
the natives of Devonsliire. If so, the difference must lie in 
the climate of the two islands ; for certainly, for quickness 
and tact, the Irishman will beat the ordinary Englishman 
hollow. 

It follows, then, that tact is not everything, but it is much. 



THE PROPER TOUCH. 165 

It is that which gives a man a good start in life : it serves 
him at every pinch, places him forward in life, puts his most 
pleasing characteristics in the best light, and keeps his 
follies and defects in the background. In homely phrase, 
it teaches a man to put his best leg foremost. It may not 
be a very noble quality, since in fact it often saves people 
from the necessity of using noble qualities ; but it is a useful 
one, and must be possessed by those who have their way to 
make in the world. The want of it will ruin many a good 
man, and has ruined thousands. Tact may be born with a 
man, but it may also be acquired. We generally manage to 
please those whom we wish to please ; and watchfulness, 
attention, and good nature, properly applied, will, sooner or 
later, produce tact 



i66 THE BETTER :SELF. 



XVL 

LOOKING FORWARD. 

Amongst the many good things which this age seems to be 
losing, one of the chief is Hope. This is not to be won- 
dered at ; it is a phenomenon which takes place every now 
and then. Men's hearts become as water, and fail at such 
junctures. The world has seen a political deluge ; the old 
has been torn up and swept away, and the new is not yet 
formed. Society in the meantime can but look on, like 
Mr. Micawber, and wait for what will next "turn up." But 
sad experience does not give it the hopefulness which was 
Micawber's chief characteristic. In his worst fortunes that 
gentleman was ready to believe in any brilhant revolution 
of his fate. He was ever prepared for the best, not for 
the worst. He would not have been surprised if an uncle, 
of whom he had never heard, had left him a fortune of 
half a million or so, or if the Lord Chancellor had given 
him a sinecure worth a few thousands a-year. This hope- 
fulness is one of the charms of the character. K man who 
lives in the delightful expectation of "something turning 



LOOKING FORWARD, 167 

up " should be as happy as a child. It is the want of hope 
that kills us, the illusions that keep us alive : — 

** Bring these once more, and set me yet again 
In the possession of Life's gramerie. 
[ was not happy ; but I knew not then 
That happy I was never doom'd to be/* 

WTiile there is life there is hope : that is the sentence which 
cheers us all. No one thanks the prosaic man who is ready 
4^ prove that there is no ground for so pleasant an illusion, 
and that as yesterday was, so to-morrow will be, a day of 
struggle, trouble, and terrible sameness to ninety-nine out 
of every hundred now^ living in the world. 

And perhaps one could not do better than to cultivate 
Hope largely. Both men and nations could do so, though 
the^ha'^iTmay^nd does grow out of fashion. 

But the wisest men in the vivacious Frenchr-nation, 
which plays so large a part in European matters, seem to 
have, for a time, passed under Dante's gate, upon which was 
\mtten, "All hope abandon ye who enter here;" and others 
not less wise predict a gradual decline of the Latin races. 
Even the ever hopeful M. Thiers could not comfort them. 

A very hopeless walk is that which is all down hill, — 
from bad to worse ; and yet England, no less than France, 
is said to have entered upon it. We have ceased, it is said, 
to grow. Certainly our statesmen seem to be content to 
keep things as they are, and are ready to negative any 



1 68 THE BETTER SELF. 

proposition which will call forth the vigour of the nation 
and cost money. Thus two friends and old enemies, 
England and France, the one degenerating, the other 
destroyed, defeated, and burdened with debt, seem to be 
in a hopeless condition. Philosophical Germans have, 
indeed, lately pictured England as falling to pieces, unable 
to govern, a prey to demagogues and uninstructed working 
classes, who are ready to sacrifice everything to Trades 
Unions, and guided by statesmen who are too old and too 
dull to see what they ought to do, or too cowardly to 
do it. 

On the other hand, the regeneration of France seems to 
many a reflective Frenchman impossible. The peasantry, 
that stay of every nation, that broad base of all prosperity, 
are hastening to destruction. Goldsmith had doubtless such 
a picture in view when he said, — 

** Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade ; 
A breath can make them, as a ibreath has made ; 
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, 
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied.'* 

"The peasantry," says M. Gabriel Monod, in his recent 
experiences of a campaign on the Loire, " are brutally 
ignorant, and even when intelligent, shamefully demoralized, 
and scandalously profligate and wicked. Their behaviour 
was the most lamentable of all the lamentable spectacles in 
this unhappy struggle." It is among them " that the results 



LOOKING FORWARD. 169 

of ignorance and selfishness have exhibited themselves in 
the most striking manner. They were too selfish to make 
the least sacrifice for the soldiery, — utterly vile ; their state 
' of demoralization was frightful." 

As the French peasantry, taught by French priests, have 
been held up to us by Archbishop Manning as models of 
virtue, while England has been said by the same authority 
to be " a land of darkness and sin," this simple statement 
surprises us. But M. Monod (and it is impossible to doubt 
the sincerity of this gentleman's convictions, and every one 
should read his paper in Frazei-'s Magazine) beholds also 
'^ the utter disorganization of French society, — a disorgan- 
ization the present disasters in Paris are fast converting into 
ruin." Whereat " the shopkeepers and idlers laugh and 
stare," visit the ruins, idle about the sights, crowd to the 
opened theatres, and, in fact, "fiddle while Rome is 
burning." " In my distress," continues the writer, " I ask 
myself. Whence are we to look for safety and regeneration ? 
Can it be that this great nation, which has done so much for 
civilization and the world, is destined to end by pointing the 
moral of her own ruin ?" 

We may well pardon M. Monod for his hopelessness. 
M. Dumas, the younger, who has WTitten an admirable 
letter to his countrymen, telling them " not to go looking 
for a man, but to be the men themselves," seems to be 
almost as hopeless as M. Monod. " If you do not reform," 



I70 THE BETTER SELF. 

he says, ^^ if you continue to nurse yourselves upon lying 
newspapers, lying novels, political lies, and shams of all 
sorts, farewell to you ! — the deluge is upon you ! As for 
us, we will look out of the ark to see you drown." 

Take these outlooks, then, couple them with the im- 
becihty of our governing classes, who do not know how to 
say '' no," and who let Hyde Park be trampled to pieces by 
a set of roughs, — who, to say the least, have no more 
business there with a political meeting than in St. Paul's 
Cathedral, — statesmen who waver from one side to the 
other, who raise more taxes, but do not try to make our 
army larger or more efficient, — and we shall find abundant 
cause to make the good men of the nations mourn : but 
there is no reason for either people to be hopeless. In the 
darkness the stars are best seen : in trouble and distress the 
beauty of Hope shines with its purest, steadiest lustre. It 
deserves to be what it is, — the centre star in the crown 
of religion. There it burns — its effulgence is lighted by 
God himself ; and let us remember that there is not one of 
His saints in the long history of the world but has worn 
this crown. Faith, Hope, and Charity, — faith in goodness 
and in God, hope for His ultimate triumph over evil, and 
the loveliest love of all, sweet charity toward all men. 

There are times in the life of a nation and in the life of 
man when want of hope is natural. In the Civil War of 
Charles the First, Lord Falkland, one of the- most admirable 



LOOKING FORWARD. 171 

characters on either side, exhibited the deepest melancholy, 
and may be said to have died of regret for his country's 
dismiion. Before the war Cromwell himself, and other 
patriotic men, regarding the country as hopelessly involved 
and under an irresponsible despot, were ready to leave it. 
During the French Revolution many of the best men of the 
Girondins committed suicide, as men utterly hopeless of 
their country's welfare. The same feeling was observed 
when the great Republic of Rome fell under the power of 
the ambitious men who prepared the way for Imperialism. 
At present, men of thought and culture in France have a 
grave cause to be hopeless. There seems but little prospect 
of regeneration. Republicanism, Bourbonism and another 
attack upon Rome, or the domination of the army and the 
return of Bonapartism, are the three paths immediately 
before the nation, although for a moment blocked by 
a Presidential term of years ! Each path is beset with 
difficulty. A firm adherence to the policy of disarmament, 
retrenchment, and that peace and quietude which can alone 
restore the nation, is the last thing upon the programme of 
any party. . So in life and health, man reaches a certain 
state of fortune or state of body in which he can pursue his 
course no longer. In the slang of the day, he is " going to 
the bad,"— his state is hopeless. At such a crisis he may be 
saved by bankruptcy, or by some dreadful illness. Should 
he abandon hope, he dies. It is not hard work that kills a 



172 THE BETTER SELF. 

man ; it is the hopeless nature of his work, his non-success. 
This is always felt when a man has to struggle against a load 
of debt, and is well-defined as "whipping-up a dead horse." 

He who abandons hope hurries on to the climax; he 
looks upon the dark side of the shield ; and however bad 
our fortune or health may be, there are always two sides. 
He does not injure others, perhaps ; but he lames and 
cramps himself. It may be that his want of hope is owing 
to physical causes ; but he will do well to combat them in 
every possible way. He should remember, too, that Hope, 
like Faith, can build upon very little ; it is like many other 
virtues, and becomes none at all if it requires to be founded 
on a certainty. It often defers only a disappointment ; its 
fruition is, perhaps, never so enjoyable as it was painted. 
Expectation is almost always much better than the reality ; 
but what of that? The superiority that hopeful people 
show over the despondent, is, that they are sustained during 
their trials, and that they may realize what they wish for. 
While the despondent man plods on his miry ways in sleet 
and rain, the hopeful one gaily takes his walks in sunshine. 
There is the same difference between the Optimist and the 
Pessimist. 

Both reach the same end ; and both, no doubt, will be 
able to ascertain the great secret; but during the journey the 
hopeful man and the Optimist get the best of it by a long 
way. The desponding, despairing nature that fears every- 



LOOKING FORWARD. 173 

thing, may wake up to what it fears. As a rule, it does 
not do so ; for as nothing is rarely so bright as was hoped 
for, so nothing is so dark as we had feared. In addition to 
the trouble when it comes, the desponding heart has had 
the miserable employment of going out and meeting the 
trouble on its long, melancholy journey. 

The despondent ones are too fond of saying that hopeful 
people owe all to their sanguine complexion and condition 
of health. It is so easy, they assert, for Jones to be hopeful; 
it is natural to him. Nothing can be less true. To most 
men hopefulness is a virtue, because it is a task and a duty; 
it is not everybody who .looks at the world with rose- 
coloured spectacles. A wise man must know that as yester- 
day was, so will to-day be, and that to-morrow will succeed, 
and other morrows after that, bearing with them the same 
trivial round of common wants and common duties, without 
any unusual or bright ray. But he does not on that account 
bate one jot of hope, but ^* still bears up and steers right 
onward." 

So in the dead waste and middle of the night of our 
political existence, France and England may cherish great 
hopes. Now is the time for great men to be born, and for 
young men to grow abhorrent of time-serving and servility to 
the mob, of lassitude and letting things slide, and to raise 
themselves to what they would call a better form. We 
cannot yet pull our feet out of the Slough of Despond, but 



174 THE BETTER SELF. 

we may be sure that time will bring about a reaction. 
History teaches us that it will be so. For a long time 
General Paoli struggled for the freedom of Corsica. It is 
but a little island, almost equally cut off from Italy and 
France, and at times subjugated by one or the other when 
wanted as a depot or a resort. France has used this island 
with especial cruelty; but, says a French historian, *'the 
very same year in which the patriots were put down by our 
arms, Corsica gave birth to one whom its conquerors were 
soon to acknowledge as their master." Napoleon was born 
at Ajaccio on the 15th of August, 1769, just two months 
after the French conquest of that island. His youth, spent 
some part in friendship with, and almost wholly in a general 
study of, the ancient love of freedom and Spartan simplicity 
of Paoli, was but a preparation for that ambitious career 
which raised France above the level of European nations, 
and his native island to the same rank as an integral portion 
of the Empire. 

As History, while showing us that there are many dis- 
creditable failures and miserable declensions, proves to us 
that there is along with these a constant tendency in civiliza- 
tion at once to recover and to raise men to higher levels, 
as that poetic thought is also true which sings unfalteringly — 

** Freedom's battle once begun, 
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son, 
Though baffled oft, is ever won, — '* 



LOOKING FORWARD, 175 

so there is with individual man constant room for hope. 
Poets have written on the pleasures of hope, and moralists 
have been very general in praising and in blaming it. 
" Hope," says Haliburton, " is a pleasant acquaintance, but 
an unsafe friend. Hope is not the man for your banker; but 
he may do very well for a travelling companion." 

It is the best travelling companion in the world, and 
certainly no bad banker, if you do not draw on him too 
much. We all do very badly without it, for distance will 
lend no enchantment to the view if our companion is one of 
those prosaic people who assure us that all is barren from 
Dan to Beersheba. A certain bravery, an elevation of 
spirit, and constancy of mind are the concomitants of Hope. 
It is a noble virtue, and has its roots or its basis in faith. It 
reacts upon a man's self, purifies him and upholds him in his 
trials, and gives him strength to bear them. It is unfair to 
call it delusive, since delusive hopes are generally foolishly 
founded, and sinful or harmful in their indulgence. That 
hope only is righteous which has a basis of reason. When 
we are ready to cry with that most prosaic Glover, whom it 
is delightful to quote because nobody else will cite him, — 

" Oh Hope, sweet flatterer, whose delusive touch 
Sheds on afflicted minds the balm of comfort,'* 

we may be sure that we have been indulging, not our manly 
and reasonable, but our extravagant and romantic feelings. 



176 THE BETTER SELF. 

It is quite true that " from the lowest depths there is a path 
to the loftiest height;" but it is a bad way to get there if 
we willingly make the descent There is great wisdom in 
indulging in moderate hopes, which will add wings to our 
courage and energy to our wills. True hope is indeed a 
vigorous principle, and there has been no great man or 
woman but has had recourse to it. Cowley calls it *^the 
sick man's health, the lover's victory, the poor man's wealth;" 
and it is indeed valuable as all these; but it is yet more, — 
it is the brave and wise man's consolation and staff of sup- 
port; always to be retained while there is life, — ^never to be 
abandoned, even in death. 



( 177 ) 



XVII. 

GOOD NATURE, TEMPER, AND HUMOUR. 

Whether our modem destructive philosopher will succeed 
in persuading that lofty animal called man that he is no 
better than he should be, and that, instead of being "a little 
lower than the angels," he is only a very little higher than a 
beast, is a question; but in his latest book, on the *^ Expres- 
sion of the Emotions,'' he has produced several facts to 
prove that which we already know — namely, that animals 
exhibit good temper and bad temper, and are subject to 
various humours, and are of a bad or good nature as the 
case may be. Some of these expressions of the emotions 
Are almost identical in either case, good or bad. Thus a 
cat, when pleased, will gently wave its erected tail — and Mr. 
Darwin is very learned as to the nerve force and proper 
muscles brought into play for erection : but in other speci- 
mens of the feline genus, such as the lion — Felis leo — gentle 
wagging of the tail is an expression of fury. In placing 
man — who has been defined as the only animal that laughs — 
on the same plane as the dog, Mr. Darwin roundly asserts 

N 



178 THE BETTER SELF. 

that dogs laugh. So they do in nursery legends; but, 
though a great lover of dogs, and very observant of their 
expressions, we can hardly accept the fact even when 
supported by some lines from Somerville. " A pleasurable 
and excited state of mind," says Darwin, "is exhibited by 
some dogs by grinning. This was noticed long ago by 
Somerville^ who says — 

** * And with a courtly grin the fawning hound 
Sakites thee cow'ring, his wide op'ning nose 
Upward he curls, and his large sloe-black eyes 
Melt in soft blandishments and humble joy.' '* 

This no doubt is correct as to the eyes ; but as to the grin 
we cannot agree — as also the "sniff" that Sir Charles Bell 
heard, "which resembles laughter." The good temper and 
good nature of dogs and of all animals are patent to all, but 
for His own good purpose, God has differentiated their 
expression, or, to use Mr. Darwin's method, they have not 
yet acquired our habit of smiling, not " even to the slight 
eversion of their lips, the grin and the sniff " which Sir Charles 
Bell found in them. 

Until, then, our philosophers shall have given us some- 
thing more tangible than mere bald assertions unsupported 
by satisfactory evidence, we shall believe that man is the 
only animal which smiles and laughs — but not the only one, 
perhaps, which weeps. To him a wider expanse of power is 
vouchsafed, with muscles to unclose the lachrymatory ducts 



GOOD NATURE, TEMPER, AND HUMOUR. 179 

and to pucker the good-humoured wrinkles round the eye, 
as well as make the mouth curve itself into varied form and 
to "laugh jnortal" when its owner is tickled with pleasure. 

What is it, this important element of life — this that carries 
so overwhelming a majority that it is as nine to one? The 
three qualities which we have chosen for the subject of this 
essay are very different. Good nature arises from race, 
blood, breeding; is inheritable, and depends more upon 
one's parents than upon one's self. It is also somewhat 
subject to geographical conditions, and takes much of its 
substance from the air we breathe and the land we inhabit. 
It is an affair of race. The mild Hindoo and the self-satis- 
fied but "heathen Chinee," are good-natured, placid creatures, 
as one may see from ever}^ line of their calm countenances, 
although beneath that placid surface there are a host of 
angry passions, forceful and cruel as history has often borne 
witness. The Russian, Dacian, or Roumanian, the Italian, 
Spanish, and Celtic peoples, are by no means so good-natured, 
although they may be, and frequently are sweet-tempered. 
As a rule, nations dwelling in deeply wooded and remote 
countries, far from civilization and the business of the much- 
peopled world, are, if good-tempered, melancholy and sad, 
and subject to fits of dejection, delighting in gloomy subjects, 
both in poetry and in art. 

We have an instance of a lower sense of good nature — 
often mentioned as appertaining to a man and almost 



i8o THE BETTER SELF. 

inseparable from him, but looked upon as a rather easy 
indulgence — in the case of Charles II., who would even 
permit his courtiers to break unseemly jests upon him; 
yet the countenance of Charles, as his portraits attest, is 
saturnine, and no doubt his natural state was melancholy, 
broken only by a sensual indulgence and love of pleasure. 
His good nature will, if studied, resolve itself into a love 
of ease, a sort of laissez-faire temper, into which his many 
adventures, his trials, and the temper of the times had 
schooled him. So long as he was at his ease he cared 
little, and was good-natured enough to let his own servants 
rob him of his fine clothes and the linen of his wardrobe; 
on the other hand, his Majesty withheld his servants' wages, 
and lost the money to his courtiers at the gambling table. 
A strong sense of justice prevents this sort of good nature — 
which, in fact, is no good nature at all, but is only to be 
put down to an easy temper, ready to indulge itself, and 
therefore not very severe on the little sins of others. There 
are instances, however, which most readers will call to mind, 
in which the easy-tempered Charles II. showed himself not 
only cruel but bitterly revengeful. 

Temper has reference to the mind, but mostly arises 
from the condition of the body. An invalid is not generally 
in a good temper — in fact, to be irritable and peevish is 
the natural condition of the sick, and one in which most 
persons who, after some years of health, find themselves 



GOOD NATURE, TEMPER, AND HUMOUR. i8i 

reduced to ill-health, have to condole with themselves. 
For temper depends naturally on the constitution; and an 
irritable man, who may really be of a sweet good nature, 
will often bitterly blame himself for letting sudden gusts 
of bad temper overcome him, possibly at the very time he 
wishes to be agreeable and amiable. But even here " sweet 
are the uses of adversity" — he learns how weak a thing 
man's will is unless directed by a greater will, which is the 
very lesson he ought to learn. On the other hand, we 
have plenty of instances in which we can admire the 
governance of temper which some men have possessed. 
Robert Hall, the author of the " Essay on Infidelity," being 
troubled with an acute disease which sometimes caused him 
to roll on the floor with agony, would rise therefrom, w^iping 
from his brow the drops of sweat which the pain had caused, 
and, trembling from the conflict, ask, " But I did not com- 
plain — I did not cry out much, did I ? " 

A greater man than Robert Hall, Doctor Samuel Johnson, 
has, we are convinced, been mistaken for an ill-natured man 
because he was often irritable and bad-tempered, being 
subject to a hypochondriacal fear of death, and a morbid 
state of nerves, no doubt inherited, and which it was simply 
impossible for him to control. It strikes us that Johnson 
knew himself better than those around him ; for one day, 
when he had arrived at the ripe age of sixty-six, he dumb- 
founded his friend Boswell by claiming to be good-humoured ; 



1 82 THE BETTER SELF. 

and Boswell records it "as a proof of how little a man 
knows of his own character in the world." " It is a 
wonderful thing, sir/' said Johnson, "how rare a quality 
good humour is in life. We meet with very few good- 
humoured men !" 

Boswell — they were then riding in Sir Joshua Reynolds' 
carriage, who, though neither mentioned the fact, had 
good-humouredly and good-naturedly ridden forward alone, 
leaving his carriage to the friends because Johnson was 
late — mentioned four of their friends, to none of whom 
Johnson allowed the full quality. One was said to be 
"acid,'' which would certainly bar any claim to good 
humour ; another was " muddy," which meant, we suppose, 
dull, phlegmatic, .and easy only, and so on. Then, stretch- 
ing himself at ease in the coach, and rolling his head, the 
great Cham of Literature said, "I look upon myself as a 
good-humoured fellow.'' 

" This light notion of himself," adds Boswell, " struck 
me with wonder; " but he answered, as he notes, also smiling, 
" No, no, sir, that will not do. You are good-natured, but 
not good-humoured. You are irascible. You have not 
patience with folly and absurdity. I believe you would 
pardon them if there were time to deprecate your ven- 
geance; but punishment follows so quick after sentence that 
they cannot escape." 

This is a noteworthy passage. Johnson no doubt did 



GOOD NATURE, TEMPER, AND HUMOUR. 183 

not possess patience with folly and absurdity ; but is a man 
not good-humoured because he does not? Johnson was a 
great moralist, and looked severely upon the misery and 
trouble that all unwise and ridiculously absurd persons, 
persons deaf to reason, bring upon mankind ; was he to be 
good-humoured and grin at such ? Is a man whose know- 
ledge of the world ripens, as it too frequently does, into a 
kindly cynicism, to be stigmatized as an ill-humoured fellow ? 
Where are we to draw the line? It is plain that good 
humour would only reside with hare-brained schoolboys 
if this were allowed. 

And, pursuing the incident, we find one of the most 
ill-natured traits in the good-humoured Boswell set forth 
incidentally and with such naivete that we cannot but smile. 
" I had brought with me," says Boswell, " a great bundle of 
Scotch magazines and newspapers in which his [Johnson's] 
* Journey to the Western Islands' was attacked in every 
mode " — let us mention that there never was a book more 
brutally ridiculed and " cut up " than was this book by the 
Scotch — " and," continues " the good-natured friend," " I 
read a great part of these to him, knowing that it would 
afford him entertainment." 

Bless the word ! What kind of entertainment can a 
sensitive author get — and authors must be sensitive, quick, 
vivid, easily hurt and easily wounded, or they would not 
be authors — from a series of ridiculous imitations and 



1 84 THE BETTER SELF. 

savagely critical articles on his style? One ludicrous 
imitation Dr. Johnson distinguished from the mass, says 
Boswell — and we think that this fact will prove that he was 
really a good-tempered man. ''This," he said, smihng, "is 
the best ; but I could caricature my own style much better 
myself' — an acute and a very good-tempered remark. 

That Johnson, in spite of many roughnesses, possessed 
good nature, good temper, and good humour, is proved by 
his life. He made his house, when a very poor man 
himself, a kind of almshouse for those who were poorer ; 
he never turned away from a young author who sought an 
introduction, or from a poor one who wanted a preface, 
and was known to give his last guinea to relieve distress. 
He no doubt put the cork in the bottle of Madeira, 
purchased with his own charity-guinea by Goldsmith — who 
at that moment was dunned by his landlady, and but for 
the help to be carried to prison — with sufficient emphasis. 
But was that ill temper ? Having an awful sense of man's 
sinfulness and worldly misery, he told a smiling pert lady, 
who loudly asserted that she was happy, that she was a 
wonderful woman if she was happy without youth, without 
good looks, without fortune, without good health, and with- 
out any reasonable hope ; but can that be called ill temper ? 
Is not a moralist to reprove what he deems to be hypocrisy? 
When a man pleaded good intentions, Johnson thundered 
out the now celebrated formula, "Sir, hell is paved with 



GOOD NATURE, TEMPER, AND HUMOUR, 185 

good intentions." The sense of the proverb was known, 
but it had never been put so forcibly before. He who 
speaks with force will feel forcibly, and we may well excuse 
roughness and occasionally rudeness, for they do not always 
detract from thorough good nature and proper and due 
good temper. 

Mercy itself, high and exalted as it is, is but a part of 
good nature acting through all, and in its best and noblest 
aspect ; and it is thrice blessed, blessing him that gives and 
him that takes. But it is to be noted that, when exercised 
in its highest instance — that of a husband forgiving an 
unfaithful wife — the world, and even a higher morality than 
that of the world, looks askance at such good nature. 
There are some sins which we cannot wholly forgive un- 
less we become partakers of them and condone them. 
We cannot approve of the " Stranger " when he pardons 
Mrs.^ Haller, though we weep at the affecting meeting : 

^* If you forget, the world will call you wise : 
If you forgive, the world will call you good ; 
But, if you take her to your heart again. 
The world will call you very, very kind.""*^ 

There is, therefore, a limit to that kind of good nature, a 
limit standing between man and woman, seemingly hard, 
cruel, and insurmountable, but yet based upon laws pro- 
ceeding from a source so wise and merciful that none can 
wish to overleap the granite wall of demarcation that it 
has raised. 



i86 THE BETTER SELF, 

Except in this, all three qualities that we write about 
may have free exercise, and the more they are exercised the 
better we shall become. There are no three minor virtues 
that do more good, none that enter more intimately into the 
little courtesies of life, none that are more able to gild and 
make fine and resplendent a common existence, like the 
sunshine which lights up a hedge-row into beauty, and 
makes a bare mountain side glitter and shme with splendour. 
Good nature is like the sohd warmth of the earth, which 
produces the fruit and warms the cold seeds into fertile 
existence ; good temper is the sunshine which lights up 
its dark corners, and good humour the warm light w^hich 
brings forward and into pleasant prominence things else 
unobserved. 

The last — especially if it be accompanied with a true 
humour, a witty view of things — is the great sweetener of 
existence. It is, of all that is outside of us — and good 
humour is hardly ever acquired, although it may be easily 
strangled, and certainly may be cultivated — the very choicest 
gift that man can receive. A great estate may, and often 
will, make a man only more miserable, especially if he be 
a very highly organized and sensitive being. A great 
intellect is almost as sure to make him melancholy and 
often .cynical. The wisest of men are never the happiest; 
they have a keener sense of what should be, and a greater 
pain in knowing what is ; they feel like a neat housewife 



GOOD NATURE, TEMPER, AND HUMOUR. 187 

placed in a thoroughly untidy house — full of a painful sense 
-of disorder. Good-natured wise men often take refuge in 
cynicism and sarcasm, like the melancholy Jacques in the 
play, and avenge themselves by biting sentences intended 
to purge the world. Great beauty — outwardly the most 
enviable of gifts, the most popular and courted, and, in 
its natural sphere, that of upper life and easy fortune, the 
most powerful — very frequently stupefies and hardens. It 
almost always makes a man a rogue and a woman a fool. 
Great acquired riches — unless accompanied by good nature, 
wisdom, and plenty of that rare appreciation of things 
called humour — are simply a trap. {WTien a man labours 
for them himself, he generally wears himself out in the 
effort, and dies before he can enjoy them; on the other 
hand, if his wealth is inherited, he needs have on hog's 
armour, a thick skin, to put up with the sneers that his 
friends and acquaintances will vent upon him ; but, armed 
with real good humour, and cultivating good nature and 
good temper, a man can pass through life with the lightest 
purse and the thinnest of cloaks. /Life's thorns will not 
scratch him ; its troubles and pitfalls will be mere exercises 
to call forth this fine quality ; its sorrows, when in his own 
breast, will be softened by this anodyne, and, when in the 
breasts of others, will draw forth its sweetest essence ; life's 
little rubs and every-day annoyances will be but the flints 
which make the sparks fly out of this true steel. Even a 



1 88 THE BETTER SELF. 

stupidly good-natured man is a pleasant companion ; and, 
as the world goes, a good-tempered fool is by no means to 
be sneered at; but when we meet with a wise man or a 
wise book, replete with good humour, we should hug either 
to our hearts, and grapple the first to us as a bosom friend, 
ay, even with " hooks of steel'* 



( 189 ) 



XVIII. 

THE CONTENTED MIND. 

\To have achieved contentment is to have conquered the 
world, to have mounted the highest rung of the ladder, to 
have climbed the mountain; and although it is perhaps 
easier to write an essay upon content than to practise it, we 
hope our readers will believe that the practice is not quite 
foreign to us — that we have learnt with St. Paul, whatever 
happens to us, "therewith to be content." This to forestall 
those objectors who, discontented themselves, wish to 
accuse all men of the same fault. What merit there is in 
being contented we forbear to say. 

We do not think that there is much ; or, to put it the 
other way, if there be any merit, we think that it is amply 
repaid. There are some dozens of blessings pronounced 
upon the virtues, and they, like potatoes, are a most paying 
crop ; but the one which cro^\Tis contentment pleases us the 
best. " A contented mind is a continual feast ; " not that 
any man would be continually feasting, but, given the con- 
tent, he always feels beatifically and healthily full and replete 



I90 THE BETTER SELF. 

as a man does after an abounding and wholesome meal. 
Perhaps there is no more comfortable earthly feeling ; it is 
as full of peace as a child which, having suckled sufficiently 
at its mother's breast, falls off smilingly to sleep. It is full 
of trust, hindered by no disquieting fears, blest above 
measure because it seeks nothing beyond the present. Such 
is content. It lives long, is healthy, does not quarrel nor 
snarl, and puts the best face on matters. It is pleasant to 
live with, and a good substance to work upon; it is not 
rapid, nor greedy, nor slovenly in its work j it is pleased with 
its remuneration ; it digests well, and is nourished, harbours 
no evil thoughts, is loyal, true, simple, and beautiful in its 
holiness, and yet it has its enemies. For, beautiful as it is, 
contentment is not the whole duty of man ; and it has its 
detractors — nay, what is more, those detractors are not with- 
out their modicum of truth. 

Thus they say that content, when it possesses a man 
thoroughly, renders him either too great a fool to want any- 
thing, or too lazy to acquire it ; that, in this age of the world, 
in most countries contentment means lethargy or death — 
simply, that man was not born to be contented ; that a sulky 
quiescence which passes for it, the unwillingness of man 
to contend, is half made up of jealousy and half of fear : 
that contentment might have been born with Adam in 
Paradise, but that it soon ceased to please him; that, if 
contentment were universal, two generations of contented 



THE CONTENTED MIND. 191 

people would '^ run " most of the human race to " earth," 
and leave the remainder spiritless, lifeless, and useless ; that 
contented races die out from lack of energy, and that such, 
during their lives, discover httle and do nothing. On the 
other hand, the restlessness and ambition of man do much 
for him ; and this is not to be denied. Let us look at both 
sides of the question — not because we are indifferent to 
truth, but because by so doing we hope the sooner to dis- 
cover truth. 

The shrewd American clergyman (?) who Avrites under 
the name of Josh Billings, and who produces many wise 
and often beautiful sentences in the midst of some very bad 
spelling and grammar — which, by the way, is not at all 
funny, but merely the exploded fashion of other writers — 
gives us in the midst of his curious verbiage some very wise 
sentences, and oftentimes some very pious ones. It is like 
sugaring pills, to put wisdom into a mere jest-book, and to 
mix serious reflections with the common rough-and-tumble- 
talk of a clown in the circus ; but it is an old fashion, dating 
perhaps in its earliest shape even from the time when 
language first assumed a written form. When one gives the 
public a large slice of unadulterated and dry wisdom in a 
didactic essay, it needs great art to render it attractive and 
to induce them to read it. But, when one introduces the 
subject with a brilliant display of bad spelling, or with a 
qua^ntity of coarse nastiness, as Rabelais — when one spells 



192 THE BETTER SELF. 

ambition ^^ambishun/^ and calls a man a '*miserabel cuss " 
— the reader picks the jewel out of the mud, wipes it clean, 
and contemplates it Thus Josh Billings, whose spelling 
we now and then follow, speaks in axioms often as wise as 
those of La Rochefoucauld. 

" Show me a thoroughly kontented person, and i will 
show you a useless phool." 

" I am in favour of all the vanities and petty ambitions, 
all the jealousies and backbitings in the world — not because 
I think they are handsome, but because they stir up men 
and women, get them on to their muscle, cultivating their 
venom and reason at the same time, and proving what a 
brilliant ' cuss ' a man may be at the same time that it proves 
what a miserable ' cuss ' he is." 

" The world is now full of learning, the arts and sciences, 
and all the thousand appliances of reason ; these things 
make ignorance the exception, and no man has a right to 
cultivate contentment enny more than he has to cut off his 
thumb and nurse the stump." 

" I have no right to bury my talents and to sacrifice on 
the dead altar of contentment what was given me." 

When the bad spelling is taken away, we see that there 
is very little of what the author calls " phun," but that there 
is a great deal of wisdom of a one-sided kind. Let us take, 
for instance, his view of the petty ambitions and the vanities 
of life, and grant that they stir up men and women, and 



THE CONTENTED MIND. 193 

cultivate their venom and wisdom ; but, if we do so too con- 
fidingly, we shall be showing ourselves contented with a 
partial view. How much evil have the vanities of life not 
done ! How much misery and bloodshed do the petty 
ambitions and the jealousies of the world occasion ! If we 
strike a balance between the good and evil, and allow that 
nothing is perhaps wholly evil, that is all we can fairly do. 

Moreover, is it certain that discontent creates in us the 
ambition to discover and to invent ? We very much ques- 
tion this. Poets write and versify as linnets sing, because 
they must, and because of the God-given power, and, more- 
over, because they are happy while they are so doing. It 
may enter into a modern " philosopher's " conception 
that a hungry and discontented bear once swam out to 
catch fish, and by fitness and constant change through 
centuries bred into the walrus. Our stupidity may be very 
great, but we honestly cannot conceive that such was 
the case. We believe in purpose — walrus for water and 
bear for land ; and what is true of the larger is true of the 
less. The inventor generally, we presume, invents because 
he has had given to him an active and creative brain. 
Necessity may urge him to be active in the way he is biased, 
and undoubtedly does do so; but hundreds of thousands of 
persons feel the stings of necessity and the pangs of discon- 
tent before one inventor shows them the way out of them. 
Thus it is that " necessity is the mother of invention '' is, 

o 



194 THE BETTER SELF. 

like all other truths, only true in a restricted sense. Whole 
races of men are non-inventive and stationary ; whether they 
are contented or not, is a question ; their necessities are as 
great as our own, and they are as eager to embrace the re- 
sults of invention. Man must therefore be regarded really as 
a creature of gifts, and these gifts are restricted in their full- 
ness to perhaps much less than a fourth of the inhabitants of 
the globe* Such gifts may be stimulated by necessity, but 
they are not created by it, and a part of the diatribe against 
contentment, viewed in this light, must fall to the ground. 

Again, it may be very well urged — and a hundred bio- 
graphies will support the assertion — that, as a rule, great 
inventors, poets, wise wTiters, lawgivers, and those who with 
most active brains improve their condition and their fellows' 
condition are, comparatively, the most contented of the 
earth. Great painters are proverbially so. Let us take 
Turnef*, a creative genius of a very high order, who revealed 
to this age the beauty of colour, the grandeur of the clouds 
and th^ atmosphere, the majesty of landscape, and the 
glories of the sky. Actually, as regards either the luxuries 
or the bare necessities of life, the man was far beyond think- 
ing of them, much less caring for them. He would often 
work without food, forgetful of hunger. To him to paint, to 
roll up his compositions, to sell them, to heap up his money 
without using it, to live as meanly as an ill-paid artisan, to 
clothe himself shabbily, seldom to enter into society, and to 



THE CONTENTED MIND. 195 

indulge as little as possible in the vanities of this life, was 
■ sufficient. That he was jealous of a rival who ^^put out" 
his landscape by crude colour hanging next to it — that he 
had a noble ambition to excel the French landscape-painter, 
Claude Lorraine, w^e do not attempt to deny. But, as a 
rule, his life was passed in obscurity and in contentment, 
himself not dreaming of how great a painter he was until 
the brilliant criticisms of John Ruskin threw a glare of light 
and fame upon him. Surely he did not owe his genius and 
greatness to his discontent ? 

So much as we know of Shakspere and Milton will 
reveal to us little of discontent in these great minds. 
Shakspere has been accused of being so careless of fame 
that he neither gathered his plays during his life, as did 
his great rival Jonson, calling them Works, nor did he, says 
Jonson, take trouble to blot and correct those that he had 
written. There is evidence that he improved and re-wrote 
Hamlet^ but not much else ; and his contemporaries and 
those that followed them nearly all speak of his rough-and- 
ready workmanship. When he had by other means than 
his dramas accumulated sufficient, he retired to his native 
town, spent his money freely, and died at an early age, 
comparatively speaking. We may gather from his works a 
whole cento of splendid passages in favour of content and 
of her sister virtues. " Poor and content," he says, " is 
rich and rich enough, '^ a line which exactly fits the subject 



196 THE BETTER SELF. 

and us better than the French " Contentment exceeds 
riches." 

Milton lay under a cloud during the latter part of his 
life. His noble cause was in disgrace, himself almost a 
proscribed man, allowed probably to live because all Europe 
would have been scandalized had he been executed. Yet 
blind, comparatively poor and deserted, there is at least 
very little expression of discontent in his writings ; his noble 
lines on his blindness breathe a splendid acquiescence in 
and a noble submission to the Divine will. One line in 
that sonnet which pictures himself as unable to work, and yet 
shows how God is surrounded by ranged angels and willing 
messengers to do His will, deserves to be written up over 
every restless man's desk or mantelpiece — 

** They also serve who only stand and wait.'* 

These are not the sentiments of a " phool." 

And what we have said of these two great poets may 
be said of almost every inventor and brain-worker. That 
inventors are often discontented men no one will affect to 
deny ; but they are so because others steal their ideas, or 
they are not appreciated, or they lay hold of the wrong end 
of the invention; but, from Arkwright and Stephenson 
far away back to Archimedes, all inventors have been 
singularly modest and quiet individuals, so full of their 
great ideas that they never troubled their neighbours except 



THE CONTENTED MIND. 197 

to get material to carry on their designs. Like spiders, they 
must spin, and Hke spiders, if left to spin quietly, they fulfil 
their function happily enough. So much for the assertion 
that it is to the ^Yant of content we owe so much. It is so 
far from being so that we may roundly assert that it is to 
the peaceful operations of a contented mind that we are 
greatly indebted. Of course it is indicative of the restless 
spirit of America and England that few patent plain old 
truths are allowed to go unquestioned. A man who tells 
us that two and two make four is perhaps too strongly 
posted in his facts to be questioned ; but here we find a 
man who denies that contentment is a blessing, and asserts 
that man is never contented, and then, if he be so, he is a 
"mean cuss.'' 

When contentment means the contraction and lethargy 
of death, of course it is bad ; when it means a wise and 
sustained circumscription, it is like a belt round a man's 
loins, strengthening him wholly. Of course it is to be con- 
strued generously. It is like the Church Catechism, and 
means life and not death. We do not praise a corpse for 
its calm quiescence in its cofhn \ and when a child defines 
his duty towards his neighbour as consisting in trying *^ to 
leani and labour truly to get mine own living, &c., in that 
state of life unto which it has pleased God to call me, " we 
are to remember that the past includes the future. We are 
not stationary, nor asked to be so \ the religion which most 



198 THE BETTER SELF. 

preaches content is the most unwearied and active in the 
world. The catechised who as a drummer-boy does his 
duty may be, ere he is twenty-two, a colour-sergeant, and 
in a battle win his officer's commission ; there are many 
instances in our army now. He is not absolved from his 
vow to duty any more than he was bound down always to 
remain a drummer-boy. But, if he is content with the one, 
he will be with the other, and he will do his duty a thousand- 
fold better in both positions ; and while so doing he will be 
so much better. 

Content carries in one hand health, and in the other 
happiness — and few will deny the beauty of these. It is 
of its own nature generous ; contracting our desires, it leaves 
us time to think of the wants and necessities of others. It 
is wisdom — plain, practical wisdom. After all, if we have 
enough to eat and drink, and wherewithal to be clothed 
decently, and in a cleanly fashion, what much else do we 
want? ^*Is that great animal better," says Jeremy Taylor, 
with one of his poetical similes, '^that hath two or three 
mountains to graze o'er than a little bee that feeds on dew 
and the manna of flowers, and what falls every morning from 
the storehouse of heaven, clouds, and Providence ? Can a 
man quench his thirst better out of a river than a full urn, 
or drink better from the fountain that is richly paved with 
marble than when it wells from the hill-side and fresh green 
turf?'' 



THE CONTENTED MIND. 



199 



Nevertheless, we admit that content must ever be com- 
parative. It must be so, or it would not be the merit of the 
well-to-do as well as of the poor. A man whose knowledge 
is bounded by the walls of his cottage, and whose desires 
are mere appetites, can be easily satisfied. Knowledge 
increases our legitimate wants. It would not now do to be 
content with bows and arrows for warfare, or the scythed 
chariot of the Britons for a cavalry charge against a picked 
body of riflemen, backed by a few Armstrong and Catling 
guns. As the world advances our horizon widens, but we 
can still grasp the golden circlet of supremely wise content. 
How great and good it is to sit at Nature's feast, and feel 
satisfied and thankful whilst others storm and struggle and 
push forward for the first places, and yet are not better filled 
than we are ! There is but one man greater than any rich 
man, and that is he that is satisfied with little. And this 
kind of satisfaction can never be taken away : it resides in 
a man's own self ; it is like the Kingdom of God, of which 
it forms a part within him. 



200 THE BETTER SELF. 



XIX. 

DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 

One wonders whether the world believes that the prosaic 
duties of paying one's debts and living below one's income 
(a very hard matter for some of us), ever enters into the list 
of heroic virtues which constitute the best part of the better 
self. And yet they do, especially the latter. 

Thrift is a badly used English word, not understood, and 
almost as much out of fashion as the practice of the thing 
it signifies. People seem to have imagined that it was a 
matter to be ashamed of, and that Hamlet's excuse of his 
mother's hasty marriage on the ground of 

** Thrift, thrift, Horatio ! the funeral bak'd meats 
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables," 

was a satire against thrift, instead of being a bitter and 
scathing invective against an incontinent and hasty marriage. 
In these showy, veneered, French-polished, and foolishly 
profuse times, a few words on thrift may be of use; but in 
writing a short essay we must not fancy that we can accom- 



DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 201 

plish much all at once. The A\Titer is the sower who goes 
out to sow seed ; his words may do good, or they may fail. 
In nineteen cases out of twenty they do fail, but if he 
succeeds in planting only one or two sound thoughts, then 
he does God service ; and to do that is to do good service. 

Let us, then, clear the way. Thrift is not a word of evil 
significance, but of good ; it does not carry an imputation 
of meanness, but of wisdom ; it does not mxcan improperly 
saving up or hoarding money, but wisely spending it. It is 
perhaps one of the highest attributes of very high natures. 
When it accompanies a great man, it makes him very great ; 
it completes the building ; sets him up as one who is iotas 
teres atque I'otiuidus^ like a scholar who is a mathematician 
as well as a scholar, and is a "double first;" fi.rst in the 
classical and first in the mathematical tripos of this great 
university. As to other men we may dispute, but as to 
Shakspere — except among some insanely conceited young 
prigs — there is no doubt that he possessed the highest 
imaginative and reflective intellect the world has ever known : 
and he vv^as especially a thrifty man. 

He came to London wdth nothing, he had little or 
nothing when he was thirty, and he died possessor of the 
best house in his native town, and making (so said the 
vicar) two thousand a year, which must have been a very 
large sum in our present money. He had a share in two 
theatres, a large wardrobe of player's clothes, a house at 



202 THE BETTER SELF. 

Bankside, some estate in the country ; he gave money, and 
he lent money. He was certainly a successful man, for his 
works were received by his fellows with all the jealousy and 
apathy that success provokes. One need not then suppose 
that thrift shows a small mind, nor that it is meanness or 
want of generosity. A more genial and generous man than 
Shakspere, for one so wise, it is difficult to conceive. 

The derivation of ^^ thrift" will help us to its true 
meaning. Thrift is only the past participle of the verb 
to thrive^ and probably comes from the Anglo-Saxon thrafian, 
tirgere^ or co-agere, to get on, press together, heap up ; or its 
original root thi-eaf^ a thrave or threave, a capital old word, 
not yet obsolete, meaning a handful, a gathering, and also a 
bottle. It always carries with it an idea of wisdom, of 
carefully and wisely doing a thing. Thus singeth Master 
George Chapman, in his " Homer " : — 

** We may both safely make netreat and thriftily employ 
Our boldeness in some great affaire, baneful to them of Troy." 

The Duke of Wellington was especially and most honour- 
ably thrifty of his men. " If," said one of the Indian 
princes, " I had such soldiers as the English, I would carry 
them to the field of battle in chairs of gold, and let them 
do nothing but fight. I would save them as if they were 
made all of diamonds." The Duke always acted upon that 
principle, and was prodigal of himself only. He would 



DOMESTIC ECONOMY, 203 

worry the Government till they hated his very name ; punish 
a commissariat-general ; write, plead, do anything for his 
soldiers ; even on certain occasions hang one, as a saving 
example. Napoleon, on the other hand, careless of means, 
and greedy of the event, was prodigal of human life, and 
almost utterly regardless of human suffering. But which 
was the more honourable and the greater soldier ? Perhaps 
the wise after-time will do justice to the little, cold, quiet, 
impassive English officer, who did not make harangues, nor 
issue eloquent and big-worded proclamations, but simply did 
his duty, and managed to win. Actually, to go back to our 
word, '' thi'ifV is thrived or thriven^ and to thrive means 
**to accumulate; to be or become rich, wealthy, prosperous; 
to prosper, to succeed, to improve." Its secondary meaning 
is to be frugal, provident, cautious, and careful. 

The present is a thriftless age. We have made money, — 
some people are making it now ; but with the various sets- 
off against us, with the complaints and starvation of our 
agricultural class, we cannot have much to brag about. The 
nation, as a whole, is accumulating wealth, but is not wisely 
saving it. She is sending away by enforced emigration some 
excellent productive wealth ; she is keeping other living 
wealth in constrained and most unwilling idleness. This 
is not thrift. 

Thrift, then, is not simply saving. You must do some- 
thing; you must have increase, or, at least, not decrease. 



204 THE BETTER SELF. 

Johnson, who with a very little money kept a large family of 
strangers in his house, had always something to spend and 
a guinea to give away ; whereas Goldsmith, who had a more 
marketable talent, and made money much more easily, was 
always poor, and glad to take the doctor's guinea. Dr. 
Johnson easily learnt the practice of thrift : and he tells us 
upon what a small sum he managed to live when he first 
came to London. ^' I dined," he said, ** very well for eight- 
pence at the ^ Pine Apple,' in New Street, and with very 
good company. Some of them had travelled. They 
expected to meet every day, but did not know each other's 
names. It used to cost the rest a shilling, for they drank 
wine " (claret — the extremely high wine duties were not 
then in force); ^^but I had a cut of meat for sixpence, 
and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a penny ; so 
that I was quite as well served, nay, better, than the rest, for 
they gave nothing." Here, then, is a true instance of thrift, 
accompanied by generosity ; and if sixpennyworth of meat 
and a pennyworth of bread will feed a man, so as to keep 
him in health and manly vigour, why should he not make 
that sufficiency his rule? As Johnson wrote in 1737, and 
the price of provision has increased, let us multiply the 
eightpence by three ; the relative value of the sum then and 
now. Certainly any young man in London can dine well 
for two shillings per diem. 

Johnson's was a very direct mind. When oppressed 



DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 205 

with neuralgia and melancholy he was asked as to the relative 
value of wines, and he jumped at once to the ultimate cause 
of the desire for this luxury. " After all," he said, "brandy 
is the best ;• that does for a man quickest and best what he 
wants doingy That is, it soothes, drugs, and intoxicates, if 
you will : and that, in plain English — only they do not own 
it — is what most men want. 

A gentleman, an Irish painter, whom Johnson met in 
early days, was the original of Ofellus in the Art of Living. 
So far from thinking that one ought to have at least three 
hundred a year, this mse gentleman said of London that 
" thirty pounds a year was enough to enable a man to live 
there without being contemptible." He allowed ten pounds 
for clothes and linen ; he said a man might live in a garret 
at eighteen-pence a week ; he might dine for sixpence ; by 
spending threepence a day in a coffee-house he might be for 
some hours a day in very good company ; he might breakfast 
on bread and milk for a penny, and do without supper. 
" On dean shii't days he should go abroad and pay visits T 

This, of course, will not quite do for our times ; thirty 
pounds a year then represented perhaps ninety of this day; but 
we seriously maintain that such an existence, narrowed as it is, 
and yet made pure and beautiful by moderation and content, 
is a thousand times more noble than that of the always full 
and feasted wasteful young citizen or city clerk of to-day, 
always well-dressed, well-gloved, clean-shirted, who spends 



2o6 THE BETTER SELF. 

three or four or six shillings for his dinner, is wasteful, 
gluttonous, loud, selfish, and full of pride and folly. Our 
age is supremely careless and luxurious ; we mistake riot for 
generosity, and luxury and license for liberality. It is well 
to be recalled to the wisdom of saving. No man, except 
the miser who starved himself to death, ever repented of 
checking his appetites and restraining his passions. 

Johnson, thirty years afterwards, referred to the duty of 
thrift, when he wrote to Mr. Benet Langton, a gentleman of 
birth and fortune, to inquire how his uncle, Mr. Peregrine 
Langton, had lived ; for this he said was notable in him, that 
he was to be distinguished " for piety and economy." Here 
Johnson uses economy in its new sense, for " tJwifty manage- 
ment^ frugality in the use of money, time, or labour," as 
defined in our dictionaries. Peregrine Langton was just 
dead (1766); he had an annuity of two hundred a-year, 
and rented a house and a few acres for twenty-eight pounds 
.a year; his sister paid him eighteen pounds a year for board 
and lodging, and he maintained a niece. His family was 
served by two maids and two men in livery ; he had a 
carriage and horses. *^ He always had a post-chaise, and 
kept three horses." * He was served daily with three or 

* If he in his time could have done this, at what state could not 
Shakspere have lived with his two thousand a year in the days of 
James I ? We must all be sadly afraid that the Stratford -on- Avon's 
parson's legend is an exaggeration. 



DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 207 

four dishes ; the appurtenances of his table were neat and 
- handsome ; he frequently entertained company, when he 
gave as good as the neighbouring gentry, and yet he had 
always a sum of money lying by him for any extraordinary 
need. What money he saved he put in the funds, and when 
he died he had a hundred and fifty pounds there. He often 
lent money to neighbours, always paid cash, never keeping 
his creditors waiting ; nay, he would take his custom from 
a tradesman who trusted his servants. His servants having 
said that the ale was not enough, he, to prove that it was, 
ordered the quantity to be bottled) and served out so 
many bottles a day, " ei^ht quarts, vrhich is the quantity 
each day at a hogshead a month ; " whereupon his servants 
found they had had too much, and not too little. 

That is exactly thrift. Here is a man, even too liberal, 
giving sixteen pints of beer a day to four women and three 
men, and yet having to prove his liberality to them by 
management ; and yet how stupid have our greatest men 
been in this respect •! How very foolish are our young men 
and good families now ! William Pitt — the son of him who 
is so much praised by Carlyle as having checked France, 
and "created'' Prussia^died shockingly in debt. In 1801 
he owed ;^45,864, and paid his creditors five shillings in 
the pound by the aid of a loan. Yet his butcher's bill — 
there was no wife to superintend the house — was so enor- 
mous, that some one has calculated it as affording his 



2o8 THE BETTER SELF. 

servants about fourteen pounds of meat a day, each man 
and woman ! Pitt was an instance, you will say, from the 
old wasteful Tory days ; but his salary (five thousand pounds 
a year) was ample then, whereas it would not be so now 
for a Prime Minister. Then, too, look at Richard Cobden, 
who sought to check the expenditure of the nation, and 
never stopped his own. Three times he came upon the 
nation ; three times he sent (or his friends sent) " the hat 
round," and he claimed and got liberal assistance. His 
friend Joseph Hume was more consistent. Coming home 
one day, he saw a new and strange cat crossing his hall, and 
wisely told his housekeeper that two cats were enough to 
kill all the mice in a London house, and that the newly 
imported Tom must be banished, or die. People laugh at 
this anecdote. Why ? Because a man governs vast con- 
cerns, is it shameful in him to look to trifles ? Trifles make 
up the sum of life. To use once more a worn-out but well- 
filled illustration, an elephant, which can rend an oak, can 
also pick up a pin with his trunk. Is the pin-picking, if 
this be true, any proof of weakness ? 

The truth is, we of the Teuton, or to use a much abused 
phrase, the Anglo-Saxon race, are a very profuse, wasteful, 
foolish race. Webster, the American statesman, an excellent 
man, was worried all his life with little debts, although his 
earnings were immense. There is nothing more sad than 
that a great life should be rendered sordid and mean from 



r 



DOMESTIC ECONOMY. . 209 

want of a little prudence. And yet it is so with some of the 
best and highest intellects we have. Men of letters, artists, 
actors, philosophers, and scholars are too often deficient in 
the great, honest, and -wise principle that lies at the bottom 
of thrift. So also are many clergymen ; and yet the Apostle 
tells us that " if any provide not for his o^vn, and especially 
for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is 
worse than an infidel." How can a spendthrift be just? 
How can he dare to be generous ? Why, if I think great 
thoughts, should I be excused if I do foolish actions ? If I 
paint a good picture, do I not own myself an incomplete 
thing if I cannot spend a pound properly ? If I act Hamlet 
like a genius, am I not a fool if I cannot be trusted with 
money that I owe to my tailor, when a wine bottle is near 
me ? Is not profuseness weakness ? We shall most of us 
agree to say that it is. 



210 THE BETTER SELF. 



XX. 

EXPECTANCY. 

In one of Victorlen Sardou's pieces, which attracted great 
popularity in Paris, there is a fine "situation" of which 
the actors, with that brilUant tact and taste for which 
French artistes are celebrated, make much. The audience 
are compelled to take a political view of the scene; and, 
between the fine acting and the political hit, the *' situation" 
does Aot fail to bring down a storm of applause. The 
incident occurs in Le Roi Garotte^ a very much mutilated 
edition of which was played in London, with all its moral 
and its politics cut out as a thing of nought. Suffice it 
to say that, in France under the Empire that fell at Sedan, 
the very name of the vegetable hero and the necessary 
colour of his costume were covert allusions to the Red 
Republic which an English audience would neither under- 
stand nor. appreciate. The freedom of Englishmen under 
an Executive which they themselves elect and can at a 
moment dismiss, and the despotisms of which, small as 



EXPECTANCY. 211 

they may be — such as the peremptory closing of public- 
houses and the restrictions of the liquor traffic — they (the 
public) themselves demand and sometimes clamour for, 
is so great that they cannot be expected to feel the fiery 
impatience of a nation groaning under the paternal inter- 
ference of an Executive which never knew the art of 
leaving well alone, and which meddled with and taxed 
everything. In saying this much, we do not deny that 
England is pretty well favoured with taxes, as every pro- 
minent and busy nation with a part to play in the world 
must be ; but, through their representatives, the people of 
Great Britain have '' a word or two '' to say before such 
taxes are imposed ; and after all, we must admit that most 
of them are the result of our greatness. 

To return to Sardou's piece. The Prince who is the 
hero possesses inexhaustible riches and a power that has 
no bounds ; he has also immortality ; and yet, seeking a 
magician, he wishes this gift to be taken away from him 
and to die. Upon this the magician naturally asks why? 
" You see this purse,^' says the Prince : " I have only to 
wish for money, and it is filled ; whatever is most precious, 
beautiful, and costly is mine. You think this gain ? Alas ! 
in this I lose all the pleasure of anticipation — all the de- 
lights of winning anything by my own exertions. All that 
I have costs me nothing ; everything is therefore worthless. 
I can have no pleasure in possession ; the humblest peasant 



212 THE BETTER SELF. 

who cultivates his plot of ground is happier than I." " But 
there is friendship," suggests the magician. " Alas ! how 
can I test that? Everybody bows to me for my riches or 
for my power." "Love?" adds his interlocutor, ^* Worse 
and worse ; I have but to wish, and the most beautiful, 
most charming, most intellectual women at once yield to 
me. What do I know of the mingled pleasure and pain 
of gaining a true and pure heart? What of the rapture 
which crowns the happy lover who dotes yet doubts — who 
trembles in expectation, and who, when he hears the soft 
confession, is lifted to the seventh heaven of bliss ? What 
do I know — what can I know — of that subtle, sweet self- 
flattery which tells the poorest of my subjects that he is 
esteemed and loved for himself alone ? " " Alas ! my 
Prince," is the sad rejoinder, "beware of absolute power." 

The sting and the poison, the honey and the virtue of 
the piece, are in those last words. Napoleon III. must 
have found other reasons when, deceived and betrayed, his 
army disappeared before the Prussians — that army com- 
posed of brave men unfed, unequipped, and unshod. But 
the lesson is not for him, but for us. We are none of us 
likely to have absolute power, although we may be little 
tyrants in our own way ; but we may as well reflect that if 
we had it, it would be a curse. We should, at least, miss 
the hopes and fears of life, which, like contrasts of colour in 
a picture, add harmony to the whole. We grumble a good 



EXPECTANCY. 213 

deal here about the weather, although Charles II., always 

sententiously wise, 

** Who never said a foolish thing, 
Nor ever did a wise one ! " 

told his courtiers not to grumble about it " I have tra- 
velled,'' he said, alluding to his exile, ^' in various countries, 
and I assure you that, for pleasant, wholesome out-door 
exercise England has the best climate of the whole." For 
the epigram just cited he cared nothing ; for he said " it 
was quite true, as his words were his own, but his actions 
were his Ministers'." As Hood's rose-girl, hawking roses 
from door to door, '^ hates the smell of roses," so there are 
those who hate the pitiless and blinding sunshine which 
strikes upward, reflecting from hot sand, bleached flag- 
stones, or pebbly beach, until the eye grows tired and the 
brain reels. We complain of drizzling rains ; what are they 
to the tropical down-pour or the mountain storm, which 
tears and ravages the earth, and in a few hours rends out 
deep watercourses and turns the dry land into a lake ? The 
middle state is by far the best of all — the middle state, 
never free from fears, but always accompanied by hopes — 
that state which bars no gate to a lawful ambition, and 
which strengthens while it controls. 

In addition to this consideration, it must be noted that 
the man who is the richest and greatest, the man who has 
all his desires and wishes most nearly fulfilled, is by no 



214 THE BETTER SELF. 

means the happiest. It is the fullest stream that looks 
the most gloomy; whereas the shallow brook rmis bright, 
sparkling, and dimpling in the morning sun. The happy 
man is he who, in health and with due caution and wisdom, 
is pursuing what he know^s to be right ; and this men with 
well-regulated minds must do when they have their families 
and themselves to provide for. Such a man, engaged in 
the pursuit of the useful, distinguishes, to use the words of 
Walter Savage Landor, the true boundary between desire 
and delight, and stands firmly upon the upper ground. He 
who knows that pleasure is not only not possession, but is 
always to be lost and always to be endangered, will be 
moderate in his hopes. The old story, so many times 
told, of Alexander the Great's crying because he had no 
more worlds to conquer, shows us how dangerous it is to 
put a limit to Hope. And truly, the usual run of preachers 
and essayists, of moralists and poets, have dealt unfairly with 
Hope. With them it is assailed with the common-place 
objurgations of being delusive, deceitful, a bubble, a cheat, 
and a flatterer. So it is, if one likes to make it so. But 
the fault lies with the individual. This we have said before, 
but it may as wtII be repeated : it is a tune well w^orth 
playing over and over again, at a time wherein young and 
old have lost a good deal of that bright hope which the 
nation used to have. More than one change of faith, aye 
and shipwreck of faith, begins with a want of hope. It 



EXPECTANCY. 215 

relieves poverty, takes away the sting from rejection, and 
defeats and smooths the pillow of disease and pain. 

If it does all this, wherein is it delusive? What can 
a man ask for more ? We find fault with our medicine, 
with the breath that that medicine has given us ; we abuse 
our food with the strength it has furnished, if we allow that 
Hope soothes our woes, and yet complain of it. / Hope is 
the very life-blood of the unfortunate ; and, as a rule, it 
is precisely those who are most unfortunate who have most 
Hope.! Among the phenomena which astonish physicians 
and doctors is the fact that, under the most depressing 
circumstances, under diseases which lower the strength and 
fret and decay the body, accompanying pain which racks 
and irritations which torment, Hope flourishes in a manner 
marvellous and unaccountable, and almost incredible; how 
it does so, they cannot say. Any one who has visited the 
poor and the afflicted must have often marvelled at their 
patience. People in hospitals and upon sick beds seem to 
us like those far down in wells and deep pits, who can 
see the stars shining which the greater light hides from us. 
It is for small mercies that we are the most thankful, and 
Hope never deserts us at our worst need. If we once allow 
the truth of Pope's couplet — and he must be a bold man 
who questions it — 

** Hope springs eternal in the human breast; 
Man never is, but always to be, blest,'* 



2i6 THE BETTER SELF. 

we must at once concede that man is a happy creature, and 
that in enjoying Hope he enjoys something more pleasing, 
certainly much more brilliant and better than possession. 
Hope, or expectation, is a long-enduring pleasure ; posses- 
sion to most of us affords only a brief regret. '^ Well, I am 
sorry that it is all over, and I wish I was going again this 
day week," said the boy, after he had seen the pantomime. 
He wanted the excitement of Hope ; fruition of the play 
was but at best a few hours' indulgence — like looking at 
fireworks, an enjoyment, brilliant perhaps, but certainly 
evanescent. 

Although hopes are antagonistic to fears — for Hope in- 
creases courage, makes a man ready to face danger, dis- 
covers new continents, finds out hidden treasures and fruitful 
islands, and is at the bottom of all the work of the world — 
yet without them the former would weave into far too gay a 
pattern. The fears supply the darker colours, and work 
well into the design. As Walt Whitman said of the graves 
of the soldiers and the bodies of the dead men during the 
American War — "They too fit well into the landscape!" 
The fears we speak of check and at the same time strengthen 
our hopes ; they prune the tree, and the wood grows the 
stronger. In fact, were it not for them, Hope would merge 
into certainty, without those gradations of doubt which make 
even deferred hopes brilliant and beautiful. It is well now 
and then to dash and discolour the hopes oi the young, but 



EXPECTANCY. 217 

not to destroy them. Anaxagoras, the wise Greek, thought 
it better by far to supply them to the young — but at a 
distance. Being asked by the people of Lampsacus 
whether, when he died, they could do anything to com- 
memorate him, '' Yes," he answered, "" let the boys have a 
holiday on the anniversary of my death." To that he knew 
they would look forward, and by that would he be remem- 
bered. There is something very beautiful in the gentle 
wisdom which dictated the answer. The harder the tasks, 
the greater the troubles of the little Greek scholars, the 
brighter would appear the holiday they were to have ; and 
when they had grown into reflective men, and looked back 
on happy days gilded with the spring of youth, they would 
remember the occasion, and inquire who was that Anax- 
agoras who had got them the holiday. The world ought to 
show more men like this philosopher, who built his hopes of 
being remembered after death on the happiness he had 
given to those who remained alive. 

The most frequently quoted passage concerning Hope 
is one that does not do much credit to man's appreciation 
of the blessing : for a blessing it is, the basis of courage, 
force, endeavour, and power; so much so, that there is no 
instance that can be cited from history of a great man who 
was not, at least during his time of action — his youth and 
his manhood — a hopeful man. The quotation referred to is 
generally unfairly given, because its best and explanatory 



2i8 THE BETTER SELF. 

half is omitted. It is from the Proverbs of Solomon : 
*' Hope deferred maketh the heart sick ; but " — here comes 
the chief clause — " when the desire cometh it is a tree of 
life." The first clause refers to the fears which always 
accompany Hope, as the shadow follows the figure of a man 
walking in the sunshine ; but the " desire " (literally the 
Hope), when it cometh, is " a tree of life." 

Doctor Johnson, sage in his observation, although a man 
bent down by hereditary disease and many cares, recognises 
this. Throughout his works there are constant references to 
the good which Hope does. ^^ Whatever enlarges Hope," he 
says in one place, " will exalt courage ; " in another, 
'' Always cultivate Hope : our powers owe much of their 
energy to our hopes." Again, ** It is the chief blessing of 
man ; " ay, not only a blessing in the sense that some people 
mean — a spiritual aid, an unseen, an intangible matter — 
but real riches, real comfort, and true health. He is poor 
indeed who has lost all Hope, and is a mere subject to fear 
and dread and melancholy. The fearful, hopeless man is 
truly poor, a double sufferer, an anticipator of evils, a shrink- 
ing coward when those evils come ; whereas Hope, like the 
cork jacket to a man learning to swim, not only supports 
him and gives him strength at the outset, when he most 
wants it, but absolutely teaches him and sustains him in his 
endeavours. 

It will be well if parents, and those who try to attain a 



EXPECTANCY. 219 

better self, would try to cultivate and not to check hopes in 
their children and themselves. Some old bachelor relations 
seem akin to Ralph Nickleby, who calls Nicholas a boy, 
with supreme contempt, as if he never had been a boy him- 
self, and as if he could be so at any time of his life, but 
would not be on any account. These old bachelors, and 
old maids too, not being accustomed to children, are 
shocked and astonished at their exuberant happiness and 
ever-budding hopes. The great point that these kindly 
relations make is to continually snip off such tender buds ; 
or, if they find Hope blossoming, to root up as much as 
they can of the blessed flower. " Oh, we are going out, 
auntie, into the country: we shall be so happy!'' *^ My 
child," is the sombre reply, ^'we are not made to be happy; 
the last time / went out it rained all day long, and spoilt 
my new silk dress." '^Blessed is he," cries the dry and 
misanthropic uncle, ^^ who expecteth nothing ; verily, he 
shall not be disappointed." We doubt and question both 
clauses of the sentence. A man who expects nothing is the 
very reverse of blessed. A man without Hope sinks like 
lead to the bottom of Life's turbid stream. Nor do we 
believe that he is not disappointed. The man who hypo- 
critically pretends that he expects nothing, that he is a con- 
tented creature, without Hope and without any extravagant 
idea, accepting the plain jog-trot way of life, is generally a 
selfish, quiet, reticent fellow, who indulges in the wildest 



220 THE BETTER SELF. 

ambitions, and who would not be surprised if a relation left 
him a windfall of half a million, or the inhabitants of the 
Fiji Islands came over here to lay their crown at his feet. 
Let us teach children to indulge in moderate and manly 
hopes ; not to be played with, but to be supported by. 
Such hopes almost always come true, as good men will tell 
who have known life's ways and God's goodness, and who 
own that He gives to by far the greatest number of us 
" more than we either desire or deserve,*' 



( 221 ; 



XXL 

ON KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN. 

Next to the generous and open approval certainly should 
be considered that famous family panacea with some people, 
of educating children by " snubbing " and pressing them 
down. Now he who said that a positive injury was sooner 
forgiven and forgotten than a positive insult, was quite right. 
The sense of injury brings with it a feeling of importance, 
but not the snub. A little farmer will brag that Lord Dash- 
away, a neighbouring potentate of the hunting-field, has 
committed a trespass, and he feels happy. It is no matter 
that he has a few acres of turnips ruined from the way in 
which " my lord," followed by the whole " field," careered, 
like a Wilder Jdger, over the turnip patch. For the time 
the agriculturist is on an equality with " my lord ; " but if 
Mr. Wurzell had been snubbed by his lordship, had been 
contemptuously overlooked or slighted, he would feel much 
more hurt. 

This sort of deadly wound is one of the facts and one of 
the puzzles of humanity. It is certain that all feel a slight ; 



222 THE BETTER SELF. 

and yet at the same time the word itself shows the small 
importance of the injury. When Dryden, in one of his 
fine and sonorous verses, made his heroine say — 

**My wound is gi-eat because it is so small," 

the Duke of Buckingham, who hated and ridiculed the brave 
old poet, rose in his box and rejoined, in a loud voice — 
*' Then it were greater were it none at all 1 " 

But, though he destroyed the chance of the play, he did not 
root up the truth of the line. Wounds are often great be- 
cause they are small ; and perhaps Buckingham's line is not 
altogether nonsense. It may be that, when there is no 
wound at all, we are worst off. Here is a subtle confession, 
made in a speech by the grave Mr. Henry Richard, M. P. 

"The Nonconformists," he had the humour or satire to 
say, " were an eminently quiet, retiring, and domestic 
people " — then who causes the commotion ? " They were 
sometimes called the stormy petrels of politics, delighting 
in the strife of elements, and taking pleasure in contention ; 
but that was not the case. He only wished to pull do^^^l 
the partition wall (the Church) between Conformists and 
Nonconformists, that they might be placed on a level of 
absolute freedom." Considering how lively the Noncon- 
formists are, that several were in the late Government, and 
that they did almost what they liked with Ireland, and have 
broken up every scheme of general education for fifty years, 



ON KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN. 223 

this was not so bad. Mr. Richard then enumerated the 
wrongs he and his fellows have to bear. *^ Nonconformists 
were told that the only sacrifices they had to bear were 
social sacrifices. But what sacrifices could be more galling 
than these? They were insulted, sneered at, looked at 
askance, and placed at a disadvantage in competition for 
public offices." 

These were now all the grievances of which Mr. Richard, 
in a sensational speech, had to complain. The great and 
good John Bunyan was imprisoned by a tyrannical govern- 
ment — and the circumstance was a providential one, for 
through it we acquired the tinker's wonderful book. The 
saint-like early Nonconformists — of whom there were many 
— suffered from the operation of the Five-mile Act, and had 
to travel ten miles to and fro to preach their antagonism. 
But Mr. Miall and Mr. Richard, M.P., have to undergo no 
such deprivations, and, in the way of exaggeration, "give 
rein " entirely to their imagination. We need hardly say 
that since, in four short years, two of the senior wranglers of 
Cambridge have been sons of Nonconformists, and that 
these young men would be welcomed in any office or in any 
society — since Jews, the most nonconforming of all, have 
held eminent offices under Government and entertain 
the Heir to the Crown as a guest — what Mr. Richard 
says is simply untrue. As to the fact of Nonconformists 
being " insulted, sneered at, looked at askance," we can say 



224 THE BETTER SELF. 

little. They are perhaps snubbed — they know best whether 
they are or not. A Churchman., for instance, does not 
desire to be married in a Dissenting chapel, nor to be 
buried in a Dissenters' burial-ground ; therefore neither he 
nor his friends get " snubbed '' by refusal. Nor does he 
hear the surprised " Oh ! " of the parson when a life-long 
dissent is broken up by such occasional conformity. But, 
beyond that, the Dissenter gets really no more than he asks 
for. He himself has chosen, for conscience' sake, to be a 
Dissenter. Is he so unheroic as to wish to play the part of 
a hero and yet to bear no pain or penalty? He chooses, 
let us say, to be a Quaker, and to wear a broad-brimmed hat 
and a straight-cut coat. Do his fellow Christians " snub " 
him because their hats are narrow and their collars fold 
over ? He deems it sinful to take an oath, and he has been 
relieved from the necessity, while we are obliged to swear. 
It is we who are *^ snubbed. '^ 

If we choose to separate in thought or in action from the 
body of our fellow-Christians, we must be prepared to 
hallow our sacrifice in some way. If we choose to abstain 
from wine, we cannot be angry if the bottle is not put before 
us. To go away from the herd, and then to say that we are 
ill-used and have the worst of the pasturage, is to complain 
with as comical an ignorance as the clown in Hamlet, who 
says it is a shame that the rich people should be allowed to 
kill themselves more than their " even Christians." 



ON KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN, 225 

And a very happy thing it is for us that we can record 
■ the fact that all that Mr. Miall and Mr. Richard can say is 
that " Noncons." get *^ snubbed." Their wound is great 
because it is so small. No one wishes to elevate them into 
martyrs — and nothing hurts some people so much as being 
let " severely alone." 

If we turn to the " weaker vessel," as woman has been 
called, in simple and Christian charity, we shall find that 
very much of the injustice she complains of amounts merely 
to "snubbing." There are questions that men think too 
delicate to debate before women, as unfitted for their ex- 
perience. There are secrets in all trades ; and we who, so 
to speak, carry on the trade of being men, object to the 
presence of those who are not of our sex. We do this 
partly out of politeness, partly because women are not cool 
judges of affairs masculine, partly because we consider 
certain provinces to be our own. Our simple reservation 
of many of the hardest, most unpleasant, and worst-paid 
businesses to our sex has hurt v/omen more than we knov/. 
They quarrel with nature and with society. A woman 
writes that "women are weak because they have not that 
bracing education of mind and body that men receive. 
Women marry simply for a home, because they have not 
been trained to fight the battle of life for themselves, and 
because their lives are so dull and stagnant that they think 
any change must be for the better. And what misery does 

Q 



226 THE BETTER SELF. 

a so-called love match end in !, Why, if girls had some 
real work in the world to do, they would not have time 
to imagine themselves in love with the first man vv^ho 
proposes.'x c/xx^iA^ 

This is like nurse beating the ground because baby 
throws himself down. Woman's work is just as " real " as 
man's. Woman's education is not so scientific perhaps, but 
it is just as '^bracing" as man's. Her catechism is just the 
same as his, and the only " bracing " path of education he 
ever receives. 

As regards the higher aims of life, it is not very bracing 
to learn that a straight line lies evenly between its extreme 
points, nor that the two sides of a triangle are together 
greater than the third side * and studies in Horace, Ovid, or 
even in Lucretius and Plato, are not very bracing. Fenelon 
and Pascal, Dante and Milton, whose books girls learn to 
read, are much more elevating and strengthening. But, 
because Fashion has for this age excluded Greek from a 
young lady's studies, women feel themselves "snubbed." 
They imagine that men's strength lies in their education. It 
does not. Education never made a fool wise — rather it 
gave him nfe-e way^in which to exhibit his folly. If the 
lady who wrote the above were to see the young simpletons 
who often take very fair honours at their Universities, she 
would not put all down to education. 

As for love — well, to tell the truth, men fall in love and 



ON KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN 227 

women accept them. We are the victhiis. Hawthorne was 
quite right when he said, ^flt is a mistaken idea which men 
generally entertain that natm'e made women especially prone 
to throw their whole being into what is technically termed 
love. ] When w^omen have other objects in life, they are not 
apt to fall in love."] But is it not rather hard for men to be 
accused of misunderstanding women, and of using them 
unjustly, w^hen it is to them that they have dedicated their 
noblest feelings, when they have gifted them with all that is 
chaste and beautiful. When they have elevated their idol 
into a goddess, it is hard that she should launch her thunders 
at the heads of her votaries. " I have heard men," says the 
lady above quoted, " sneer at women, and then say, ' I 
would not have them changed. I like them .just as they 
are.' Heavens ! are we always to be merely the petted 
favourites of men? Will they never be just to us? I 
suppose they cannot be so. Can we help hating our tyrants 
from our very souls." Surely this outburst proceeds from 
one who has been '^snubbed." 

Amongst nations, those that have been snubbed, or 
fancy that they have been, are too often Jhe most can- 
tankerous, opinionated, and unjus# There are two which 
offer cases in point— Ireland and America. We may at 
once express our opinion strongly that the non-residence oi 
English sovereigns or princes in Ireland, and the apparent 
neglect of that country by the CroAvn, have been very grave 



228 THE BETTER SELF. 

political errors which two or three hundred years of good 
government will not perhaps undo. We wxre speaking 
some time ago with a Connaught man, who was making 
money here by his trade, and who lived comfortably in 
England. He was a Fenian to the backbone, and said, 
openly, that he not only hated England but the English, 
although, as a rule, Englishmen had been much more just 
and friendly to him than his own countrymen. " Then,'' 
w^as our natural question, " why do you so hate this country, 
in which you have thriven?" "Well, sorr," he answered, 

"in the time of your Richard II. " and the Irish pro- 

vincialist heaped up slights and historical wrongs of five 
hundred years' standing, and flew into a hearty passion 
about matters of which a well-read Englishman never heard. 
Ireland was always "put upon" — never had her just position 
— was always regarded, he said, as the poor relation. It 
was perfectly useless to argue with him. From Richard II 
to Victoria, with the exception of James II., who came and 
asked her aid, all English sovereigns had neglected the "first 
gem of the sea." Perhaps, of all difficulties in our own 
immediate political world, the most serious is that now 
before, and ever before, the Queen's Ministers — that of 
governing Ireland so as to make the people content. 

Americans of the United States have, so far as we can 
judge, pretty much the same feeling towards us. To the 
honour of George III. he welcomed the first American 



av KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN. 229 

ambassador from his revolted colonies with the words, 
" Sir, I shall be the first loyally to acknowledge the Minister 
of a Power which I have consistently opposed." Here was 
no "snub;" happy had it been for us if our people had 
followed the loyal example of their monarch! But for 
years and years afterwards there was a feeling amongst us, 
fostered and kept up by injudicious authors, that we were 
something very superior to the Americans. Even the wise 
Sydney Smith asked in the Edinburgh Review^ "Who reads 
an American book?" The youngest amongst the nations 
was treated like the new boy at school, and was taken down 
many pegs. France, even in the throes of her Revolution, 
believed that she alone, and her General Lafayette, had 
enabled America to shake off the English yoke. She petted 
the great nation like a child; Voltaire received Franklin 
\vith the condescension of a monarch. But happily for 
France her language was not the same as her pupil's. What 
we do not understand cannot wound us. The same apphes 
to Germany, who even now snubs America very bitterly. 
"What do you think. General," asked the American com- 
mander, Sheridan, "of our great victories in the North? — 
of Gettysburg, for instance? That must have afforded you 
some study." "Sir," answered the great strategist, Count 
Moltke, "we do not study the art of war from the hasty 
struggles of armed mobs ! " From his point of view — since 
he carried on war as scientifically as he would play at chess 



230 THE BETTER SELF. 

— Count Moltke was right; but we do not hear that the 
Americans resented the ^^snub." It was not spoken in 
Enghsh. 

Learned Americans, however, feel the sense of inferiority 
very acutely. Professor Lowell, whose study of English 
literature and whose scholarship generally would do honour 
to any Englishman alive, has written a very amusing paper 
on ^'A Certain Condescension in Foreigners"— that is towards 
Americans. He owns, fairly enough, that it is not alone 
England which snubs America. All the world does, more or 
less. He cites a German, who says plainly, "America is 
without arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope 
of supplying them. It is a people wholly given to money- 
getting." He himself owns that "we," the Americans, "are 
the most common-schooled and the least cultivated people 

in the world The tone of the uncultivated Americans 

(it is Lowell who is speaking) has too often the arrogance of 
the barbarian — of the cultivated as often that of the vulgarly 
apologetic. Is there a politician amongst us who dare risk 
his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the 
exactness of superstitious countries like England? The 
patronizing manner of nations towards us is the result of 
their failing to see here anything more than a poor imitation, 
a plaster cast of Europe." 

This is bold and candid writing. Mr. Lowell owns that 
America feels the patronizing tone as a "snub." "The good 



ON KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN. 231 

old Tory aversion of old times was not hard to bear. There 
was something even refreshing in it. But/' he adds, ^^it will 
take Great Britain a long time to get over her patronizing 
ways towards us. Our common language is a fatal instru- 
ment of misapprehension." And, talking to "dear old 
mother-in-law" (why not "mother"?), "England," he con- 
cludes : " Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we 
have grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us 
darken your doors if you could help it. We know that 
perfectly well. But, pray, when we look to be treated as 
men, don't shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to 
us any longer — 

" * Do, child, go to it grandam, child ; 

Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will 
Give it a plum, a cheriy, and a fig ! ' " 

These instances will be sufficient, we think, to show the 
dire effects of the "snub" in political life. In social life the 
practice has effects as bad. Perhaps the things which most 
bitterly hurt us are the slights and snubs w^hich we have 
submitted to, although they who insulted us had, perhaps, 
not the slightest intention of so doing; for one of the 
peculiarities of the practice is that it is most effectively 
indulged in without the artist knowing or intending that he 
or she snubs. Smith is left out of Brown's party — snub 
No. I. Brown intended to ask him, and his wife apologizes; 
she is "so sorry," and she was aware, she tells a third person. 



232 THE BETTER SELF. 

how glad Mrs. Smith would have been to come, and how 
she would have enjoyed herself" — snub No. 2, and more 
bitter. Brown hopes Smith is not offended — snub No. 3. 
Why should he be offended? One might aggravate the 
snubbing, and lengthen the list almost indefinitely. And 
one remembers a snub through life. We knew an eminent 
lawyer, a man of many triumphs, whose most poignant 
hatred was against the junior partner of the firm he was 
articled to, for once telling him to enter at the clerk's door. 
The old gentleman of eighty thrilled with an insult sixty- 
four years old. 

Women are perhaps quite unaware how often they sever 
friendships and make enemies of their husbands' friends 
by unconscious snubbing. We all of us remember the old 
gentleman who, when we were boys, always shook hands by 
extending two fingers only ; and the kindly Mentor who 
assured us that we were " boys, and boys were always silly." 
It is to be hoped that we have long since forgiven both. 
Did Lord Byron ever pardon his mother for not discovering 
that he was a genius almost before he left off pinafores ? 
Alas, no! One remembers these trifles with bitterness; 
and perhaps the only way to excuse the feeling is to reflect 
upon the littleness of poor Human Nature, while we deter- 
mine never ourselves to depress or outrage the feelings of 
others. 



( 233 ) 



XXIL 

GENEROUS APPROVAL. 

There is a great deal of the child yet remaining in every 
man, and that singular animal Man has a habit of being 
governed by his weaknesses. 

It is a common observation this. All truth is common 
enough if we could but see it; but this truth forces itself 
upon us at a very early period. The mother praises and 
chirrups to her child to keep it in a good humour, though it 
has not had many months of life ; and the old nurse flatters 
her patient with some tender gossip, some familiar assertion 
of being and looking better, although she well knows that 
he has not a month to live. Soldiers or sailors, young 
curates or students of chemistry, students of poetry or the 
exact sciences, love to find out that their conduct has at 
least merited approval. 

This desire of pleasing and of receiving a delightful 
sensation from the knowledge of having pleased is very 
beneficial, and is not altogether a weakness. "We are 



234 THE BETTER SELF, 

all excited by the love of praise," says Cicero, "and it is 
the noblest spirits that feel it most." If it be a vice, it is 
one of those which Rochefoucauld has said is very much 
like a virtue. Peel asked to be remembered as one whose 
life of statesipanship had culminated in the one fact that he 
had "brought a cheap loaf to the cottage of the poor man;" 
and Hood tenderly wished that on his tombstone should be 
inscribed but one sentence — "He sang the Song of the 
Shirt" Of course the truest philosophy, and the truest or 
noblest form of religion, do equally bid us be silent about 
ourselves. What we have done, we have done. Human 
approval ! — the mistaken good opinion, it may be, of A, B, 
and C, matters little to any one of us. What does matter 
is, the unmistakable approval of our own conscience — and 
of God. But we are not all philosophers, and human ap- 
proval will ahvays have its effect upon the young, and even 
upon the stern middle-aged and the old. Not every one 
of us is strong enough — so weak a thing is poor humanity — 
to know when he is right, unless somebody else tells him so; 
or he fancies that he does not know, which amounts to the 
same thing. 

This humiliating confession is quite true, yet not so very 
humbling to the young as it is to the old. The young 
confessedly want guidance ; and in spite of the imprudence 
and inaptitude of what is cajled a " fast," but which will, 
by posterity, be stigmatized as a very slow and dull age, — 



GENEROUS APPROVAL. 235 

in spite of this, they naturally look for it from tlie old. You 
may depend upon it that in those countries where the old 
are despised and treated with rudeness and levity, as some 
travellers say they are in America, the old people first began 
the downward march by spoiling the young, and themselves 
abdicating their self-respect. Out of the Ten Command- 
ments, which we know to be inspired and to be true, let the 
young remember that there is one — " Honour thy father 
and thy mother;" and that no nation, no people, ever grew 
or continued to be great, without due respect being shown 
to the old. Age and experience are not to be bought. 
The young man feels that he cannot have known so much 
nor have felt so much as the old. It was a pretty sight 
when all the valiant warriors — Achilles, the wise Ulysses, 
the king of men, Agamemnon, and the rest, arose and stood 
uncovered before Nestor, the wisest, because the oldest of 
the Greeks. 

It was a wise and gracious thing for our Sovereign and 
the Prince Consort to rise and stand, with deep respect 
upon their countenances, before the many years of the great 
Duke of Wellington ; great in council, great in war; whose 
eighty summers had been spent in fighting more than one 
hundred pitched battles for the English crown and the 
English people, and of whose eighty winters very few had 
not been given to thought for the cause of that land he loved 
so well. And a good white head it was ; very white, bent 



236 THE BETTER SELF. 

forward, as ready to salute a private soldier as a general j 
mostly quiet and silent, but when moved to speak, charged 
with weighty words. Thackeray tells us that Major Pen- 
dennis, an old man of the world, met this excellent man, 
his old general, as he went through the park, and stood, up 
at the salute. The duke, seeing an old gentleman and an 
officer, stopped and said a few pleasant, gracious words to 
him, and all the day afterwards the major walked about as 
if the heels of his boots were at least an inch taller. Was 
the man a snob, therefore? Not a bit of it. The approval 
of his old general fired him. " Lceius sum laicdari vie abs 
ie, pater^ laudato viro^'' — to be praised by him who is worthy 
of praise, is to have one's heart moved by a noble desire 
and an honest pride. The young feel it just as much as 
did Major Pendennis. Every baby that lives to five years 
of age has that feeling in his heart, and hungers for the 
honest and open approval of his father ; and if, at the 
proper time, the father will express that, if he will show his 
son that his career, his feelings, his troubles, his little 
triumphs and defeats, are not indifferent to him, you may 
depend that in his turn the son will show respect to the 
father. When, if indeed it ever is the case — which in sober 
charity we take leave to doubt — when a young colonial 
chick, an Australian ^^ corn stalk," * or a Yankee farmer, 

* The name they give young Australian-born children who aie 
very tall. 



GENEROUS APPROVAL, 237 

calls his father " a darned old fool," and tells him to '^ dry 
up," one may depend on it that the fault ]ay at first with 
the parents of the ungracious boy, although. Heaven knows, 
he is himself to blame, and sorely enough too. 

As a governing power, people will find that gentle and 
just praise, or that which we have chosen to call open 
approbation, is much better than a continual shower of 
blame. It is the old story of the traveller who pulled his 
cloak all the tighter about him when the wind tried to get it 
from him, but who took it off and threw it a,way when the 
warm and genial sun smiled on him. 

The miserably stupid way in which some persons con- 
tinually blame and scold their servants and children, cannot 
be too much condemned. The children cry for bread, and 
they get a stone. Their little hearts are hungering for some 
honest, kindly praise, and they hear nothing but ungxacious 
*^ nagging." John has not done this, or that he has done 
badly. Mary has not brought up the dinner to a minute, or 
has spoilt the asparagus. But John and Mary never hear a 
word of praise for the three hundred times out of the year 
that everything is well done, and the dinner served most 
admirably. "Please, mum," said a servant, "I can't please 
you, and I wish to leave ; I'm very sorry, mum, because I 
could do anything in the world for the master." And why ? 
Because the master, being a kindly man of the world, had 
spoken fairly, and thanked the poor, serving fellow-being 



238 THE BETTER SELF. 

when she ran on an errand for him, or brought up his boots 

well blackened and polished. 

It was a rule with Lord Chesterfield, a man of the w^orld, 

not half so black as some moralists have painted him, that 

the least person about you deserved, consideration, kind 

words, gracious looks, and, in one word, politeness. " That 

hanger-on of the court, that page of the back-stairs," said 

he, '^ may do you an infinite deal of harm; he knows what 

you do not know ; always be civil and obliging to him." 

And in his letters to his son you find him carrying out this 

systematically. He blames the boy for his faults, but he 

always praises him for that which he thinks wise and right. 

Take care, he says, to deserve praise, and I shall always 

give it you. Be learned — his lordship is writing to a boy of 

only nine years of age — and you will deserve the praise of 

the learned. "An ignorant fellow," he goes on to say, 

** is insignificant and contemptible ; nobody cares for his 

company, and he can be just said to live, that is all. There 

is a very pretty French epigram upon the death of such an 

ignorant, insignificant fellow, the sting of which is, that all 

that can be said of him is that he was once alive, and that 

he is now dead. This is the epigram, which you may get 

by heart : — 

" * Colas est mort de maladie, 

Tu veux que j'en pleure le sort? 
Que diable veux-tu que j en dis : 
Colas vivait, Colas est mort. ' " 



GENEROUS APPROVAL. 239 

Which we may thus put into English verse for the benefit of 
those who have not had his lordship's advantages : — 

Colas by sickness done to death ! 

You ask how is it I've not cried ? 
What for ? By Jove, I'll spare my breath : 

Once Colas lived, and — Colas died. 

His lordship concludes his letter by assuring the little Doy 
that, if he turns out a dull fellow, he will earn the name of 
Colas, " which I will certainly give you, if you do not learn 
well ; " but he promises him a very different and more 
honourable name, if he only will continue to deserve 
honour. 

There are two important sections of society that are very 
much affected by a generous and open approbation, and 
who will continue to be so affected as long as the world 
exists. These are women and artists. By artists we mean 
all those who have to gain their living by the exercise of 
their imaginative faculties, such as authors, actors, painters, 
singers of a high fame, and some few others, draughtsmen 
and designers, and that large section of society which is 
made in these days to depend upon the richer and moneyed 
classes. 

Women, the larger, and truly the better half of man- 
kind, have a love of approbation strongly marked in their 
characters. You can see it in the grace they so readily 
assume ; you can read it in their love of dress. You may 



240 THE BETTER SELF, 

call this a weakness if you will ; you may try to repress it by 
making the nun cut off her hair, and cover herself with 
a garment of black ; or the Quakeress dress, in a poke bonnet 
and the ugliest disguise that can afflict humanity. You may 
try to drive out nature at the point of a bayonet, but depend 
upon it she will assert her strength again and again, and 
drive out the invader. The very nuns will wear their 
hideous cornettes with a grace, and the Quakeress will con- 
trive to look pretty. Had we not better call this love of 
approbation a strength ? 

You may depend upon it that that which God Almighty 
has universally planted is right. Man, in his impudent 
follies, might take to cutting off the horns of oxen, as he 
has done the ears and tails of dogs, and to repressing the 
endearing sympathies of children and women, and fancy 
that he was improving nature. He might quarrel with 
granite for its hardness, and loam for its friable softness. 
He might and does do all this, but if he be wise he will not 
build his house of loam, nor sow his corn upon a floor of 
granite. He had better polish* the one and cultivate the 
other, and study the uses of the qualities which God has 
given to each '' after his kind." 

Now, womankind and the artistic nature love praise, 
because they find in it the due reward for honest endeavour. 
Lower natures may be content with money. (The tradesman 
may coin his soul for half-pence,, and wait, with the patience 



GENEROUS APPROVAL. 241 

of a spider, for the coming of a customer ; the barrister may 
sell his eloquence, and be satisfied if he gains a cause and 
earns the applause of the judge ; the inventor may be 
satisfied with an ample fortune ;I but the woman who loves, 
and the artist who works for the good of the world and the 
love of his work, can only be satisfied, the one with the 
approbation of those whom she loves, the other with the 
evanescent and shadowy thing called fame. 

It was ordained from the beginning, no doubt, that poor 
humanity should count amongst its bitterest disappointments 
and trials those borne by these two classes. How many 
women are there now suffering from the want of a kindly 
love, a sweet appreciation of their goodness and their self- 
sacrifice. ifHow often will not wives do tender and grateful 
offices, adorn the home with flowers, and make the cottage 
as neat as the nest of a bird ; dress their persons with 
elegance, and their faces with smiles, and find, as a reward 
for this, the stolid indifference of the block, or the stupid 
insensibility of the lower animal. ^^She was a woman," 
wrote one who knew her sex well, " a woman down to the 
very tips of her finger-nails, and what she wanted was praise 
from the lips that she loved. Do you ask what that meant ? 
Did she want gold, or dress, or power? No; all she 
wanted was that which will buy us all, and which so few of 
us ever get; in a word, it was Love." 

Yes, that is just it. It is these little signs, the fore- 

R 



242 THE BETTER SELF. 

running of kindness, the timely notice, the generous appre- 
ciation, the wise and kindly method of observing, that prove 
ove. Else, without these, it is a capid morticum. When the 
IGrande Duchesse wishes Fritz, whom she has so madly fallen 
in love with, to reciprocate her passion, and that stupid 
corporal is blundering about the royal apartment in search 
of a hat peg whereon to place properly his cocked hat and 
feather, '^ Mon Dieu!''^ cries the duchess, in an agony of 
jealous chagrin, ^^ comme il aime son chapeauJ^ That is the 
reflection many a good wife makes almost before the honey- 
moon is over. 

" He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, 
Little better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse." 

And for years this will go on. Years of quiet agony, of 

unrequited affection, of looks of love unnoticed and un- 

returned ; acts of kindness unseen, of eloquent, loving words 

passed over as unheard, of the very flowers of the heart of 

love trampled upon and despised. This is too often the 

history of marriage. Then gradually, as the caloric of the 

atmosphere is absorbed by an iceberg which floats down 

the German Ocean, and the flowers and fields of England 

wither and grow barren at its approach, so true love cools 

down, and life grows dull and worthless and barren, till 

young people wonder how such and such a couple have 

grown so quiet and so dull. 

As it is in this life of married happiness (?) when fit 



GENEROUS APPROVAL. 243 

mates do not meet, so it is when the author or the artist 
misses the fame that he so dearly loves. A man may live 
on a good many years soured and embittered, but it is but 
a kind of half-existence that he lives. It may be for him 
the times are out of joint. It may be that a Supreme 
Artist creates time and opportunity, and from the dull 
breasts of the mob evokes sympathy for his genius. But it 
is certain that anti-poetic days exist, in which the very best 
writer in the world would get but scant measure of justice ; 
and if Pope lived at the present day, we very much doubt 
if any one would listen to his silver numbers and his happy 
moral truths. A satirist of the day has gone so far as to 
assert that if Shakspeare lived at present, in these days of 
burlesque and sensation, he would not get a living, but 
would in a rage burn his plays, condemned 

•• To beg, with written Hamlet in his hand, 
From the dull * Row/ along the duller ' Strand ; * 
On his cold hearth he'd sacrifice his scenes, 
Or write for Moses or the Magazines." 

How many men of genius are there amongst us now, the 
history of whose life is in effect marvellously like that which 
the satirist has pictured I How many a life passes like 
a day without sunshine, a year with a frosty spring, an 
unkindly summer, and a stinted harvest ! 

The remedy in this matter is simply good nature and ' 
tact, with less absorbing and dull selfishness. The age has 



244 THE BETTER SELF, 

lately gi*own ruder and ruder, narrower and more narrow. 
Laugh, as superfine critics will, at Mr. Arnold, what we 
want is more sweetness and light ; and we shall get this, 
not by a captious, criticizing method, but by a wise 
generosity and a wholesome praise of that v/hich is good in 
the young, the impulsive, and in those who feel most. 
Mr. Daniel Quilp, in Dickens's story, was accustomed to 
make his presence felt by cruel nips, blows, and pinches, 
given to women and children. He was a spiteful dwarf, 
and an idiot to boot. Let our presence be felt by the 
gladness it creates, and our wisdom be shown, not by the 
sharpness of our blame, but by the generosity of our open 
approbation. 



( 245 ) 



XXIII. 

LIKES AND DISLIKES. 

One of the most cruel things, and (as all cruel things are, to 
the natural and kindly human heart, difficult) one of the most 
difficult things for a young man or woman to make real to 
themselves is the fact that there will come a time when good 
friends will part, and really honest people will stand upon 
different sides of the way, opposed to each other, hating 
each other, having little or nothing in common with each 
other, and sacrificing friendship to principle. 

All the walks of life have divergent alleys, down which, 
one by one, our friends go. You love A for a rough, 
manly, sensible, plain-spoken man, not refined, perhaps, not 
instinctively a gentleman, but honest. By-and-by comes a 
time when you defer your own opinion to this honest man's 
views ; and there comes another time, too, when you find 
that he holds entirely distinct views upon important matters, 
which are totally irreconcilable with yours ; and you can go 
no further together. 

It is a very painful discovery this, to every man. In 



246 THE BETTER SELF. 

political life it is always occurring; in religious life it is 
the same. Mr. Faber, a Protestant, wrote some years ago an 
excellent little book about Tractarian secession to Rome, 
and he warns earnest Anglicans about it. In a few months 
(or years is it?) he is Father Faber, a most determined 
Romanist, pledged to his utmost to destroy the Church of 
England ! How about his more stable Protestant friends ? 
Here was a divergence indeed. Could friendship pardon 
his secession ? Sir Robert Peel, nurtured in the old Tory 
school of Protection — which the working men of France, 
America, and England now seem to think the true and 
wise school — is carried away by the eloquence of Cobden 
and Bright and the cheap loaf argument, — certainly a 
material, and wi'ong appeal, by the way — makes a pathetic 
speech, turns round upon his friends and repeals the 
Corn Laws, which he had sworn to defend. We do not 
here say that he did right or wrong, but we do say that 
to all his old friendships he must have bidden adieu. 
He " sold " the farmers, as they said. No wonder that 
they called him Judas, and that Mr. Disraeli pursued him 
with bitterness. Henceforward there must have been con- 
tinued antagonism between the old loyal school of Tory 
and the new-fangled Conservative, just so far as they could 
conserve. So, in a late juncture, when one party sought, as 
some believe, desperately to wound the Church, clergymen 
wrote works calling upon people to remember that there are 



LIKES AND DISLIKES, 247 

" principles at stake ; " and it is because they think highly 
of those principles that they are so fierce and so earnest. 

Men of the world, without principle, are astonished at 
the antagonism which religious men display. Luther's 
friends, to save his life, implored him not to go and stand 
his trial.- "You know," said they in effect, "that they will 
entrap you, that their minds are made up against you : you 
will be caught, put in prison, perhaps be slain." "' Here 
stand I," said Luther ; " and so help me God, I cannot do 
otherwise. If all the tiles on the house-tops were each one 
a devil " (what a simile, if we consider the curiously high- 
pitched tiled roofs of the German towns at that time) '" I 
would go." And that grand, good man went. 

Take the matter, if you like, politically and historically. 
Here is Brutus, the personal friend of Caesar, called by him 
his son, so fond is he of him, but a lover of the old regime^ 
the fine old republican times, when Rome was governed by 
great families, and had great liberties and great fame. Thus 
Brutus, a very noble Roman, a sad, thoughtful, painful man, 
pained at the political baseness and the worn-out aspect of 
the times, suddenly found that Caesar, hi^ general, his friend 
and patron, was plotting against Rome. This it was that 
threw them into opposite camps • this it was that made the 
dagger of Brutus run through the heart of Caesar. Brutus did 
not assassinate Caesar; Caesar's own acts did the deed. " Not 
that I loved Caesar less, but Rome more," said Brutus, in 



248 THE BETTER SELF. 

his vindicatory speech, preserved by Plutarch, and given 
with full spirit by Shakspere. So, truly, King Charles placed 
his royal head on the block by his repeated treacheries, and 
by the discovery of Cromwell that his own head and those 
of his friends were promised to the axe whenever Charles 
should have power. So, too, our criminals do now-a-days 
most certainly execute themselves. Foolish people petition 
for their lives, and condone their offences ; but when a man 
has placed himself in antagonism to good — when corrupt 
himself he must corrupt others— the very best thing he can 
do is to die. There arc times when, in the true sense, it is 
expedient that a man should die for the people. A leper is 
mercifully, not mercilessly, cast out, or he would infect the 
whole people. It is not cruel, it is merciful to knock a mad 
dog on the head. Now there are men who are infinitely 
more dangerous than mad dogs ; and the sooner the world, 
especially the world of silly philanthropists, learns what is 
cruelty and what is mercy, the better. Christ never preached 
theh' mercy, and His was the tenderest and kindest voice 
that ever stirred the pulsation of the all-embracing air. A 
student in dissection cut himself with his lancet ; he held it 
up to the demonstrator. " Give it me," said that gentleman. 
A clean knife and a sharp twinge did the work, and two 
joints of a live finger fell by the side of the dead body. 
How cruel, or how kind ? What says the Saviour in a like 
case ? — " Cut it off and cast it from thee ; it is better " 



LIKES AND DISLIKES. 249 

But we leave that whole passage to the consideration of 
politicians, and especially for those who wish to Americanize 
our criminal law, at a time when American thieves and 
murderers are getting so strong, that at New York citizens 
talk of appointing vigilance committees, proclaiming Lynch 
law, and shooting and hanging the thieves wherever they 
meet them. Which would be most merciful — Lynch law, or 
a true and honestly firm law which should not err on the 
side of mercy, but which, by punishing the guilty, should 
protect the guiltless ? 

In all such matters of opinion there will be divergence 
and antagonism. The great majority of mankind is so 
cowardly, that it never will face a plain duty ; and if it can in 
any way escape by a side door it will. Mercy seems pretty 
and so kind, that many people believe that it must always 
be a virtue. No virtue in life is always one ; and of this 
virtue Young has told us that sublime truth — 

" A God all mercy is a God unjust" 

These antagonisms, however, proclaim the man. These are 
tests of character, and most certainly separate the sheep 
from the goats. The world would fall to a heap without 
them. They are what mountains are to the world, and a 
backbone to a fish ; a dull flat level or a mass of pulp would 
be all that would be left without them. Milton declares that 
it was by the agency of sin that antipathies came into the 



250 THE BETTER SELF, 

world ; and it follows that, if we were all angels, we should 
all love that which is good ; but still we doubt whether 
Milton is philosophical as well as poetical in this passage, — 

*' Discord, first 
Daughter of sin, among the irrational 
Death introduced : through fierce antipathy 
Beast now with beast gave war, and fowl with fowl, 
And fish with fish ; to graze the herb all leaving, 
Devoured each other, nor stood much in awe 
Of man, but fled him, and with countenance grim 
Glared on him passing." 

Antipathy is as great a necessity as sympathy, and beasts 
requiring flesh food demand victims to supply that food. 
Nor is the behest cruel. Death must come by old age, or 
hunger, or want, or by being made a prey of; and the latter 
is just as merciful as the others. The most melancholy 
thing in the world — and Shakspere has, by his divine in- 
tuition, appropriated the simile — is an old lion, stiff, tooth- 
less, with his claws grown too long and too brittle to seize 
his prey. Unable to roam abroad and cater for himself, he 
lies surrounded by old bones at the entrance of his cave, 
and dies a slow death of poverty, ceaseless rage, and gnaw- 
ing hunger. The fate of the lamb, suddenly snapped up in 
its brief and joyous youth, is happiness itself compared with 
that of the old lion. 

In man antipathy plays its part as well as sympathy. It 
is eminently useful; and as a mere matter of advice, we 



LIKES AND DISLIKES, 251 

should strongly urge all people to yield to both, or certainly 
to consult them, not only in food or diet, dress and habit, 
but in friends and acquaintance. It is an old nurse's saying, 
but a very true one, that if a person does not relish his food, 
and does not feel that it " does him good," it will not do 
him any good. So if a man does not feel drawn to another, 
he had best have little to do with him. One cannot force 
likes and dislikes. It is told of Dr. Chalmers that some of 
the very strongest temptations that he had to contend with 
were certain antipathies and aversions to people, which he 
formed because of their disagreeable peculiarities. Such a 
sensitiveness might be unfortunate for a Christian preacher ; 
but we can readily understand that he may many a time 
have repented having conquered these antipathies. At any 
rate, in a long experience, we have never found any of these 
false. Having no undue aversions nor prejudices, and being 
perfectly ready to meet any man, all the more readily if he 
was a stranger, we have often had instinctive antipathies to 
men and their manners, we have seen that the face was low, 
mean, and cunning, and that the voice corresponded. But 
having, out of Christian duty, expelled these prejudices, and 
become familiar with such friends, we have invariably had 
to repent our intimacy. We had neglected a wholesome 
prejudice, and we suffered from it. If in the world men 
would listen a little more frequently to the voice of these 
naturally implanted m^onitors, it w^ould be better for them. 



252 THE BETTER SELF. 

It is only in the millennium that the lion will lie down with 
the lamb : as it is, we should very seriously advise the lamb 
to get as far away from the lion as he can. It is not that 
the lion is a bad fellow in his way — of late naturalists 
declare that he is a sneak, a prowling, cat-like assassin, an 
arrant coward, that a good tiger will beat him all to nothing; 
but he has the reputation of being the king of beasts — still, 
on the whole, he is not good company for the lamb, and 
that creature may be pardoned for a little natural antipathy 
on his side. 

The inner voice of Nature in these antipathies and 
sympathies, that low, sweet voice by which we are safely 
led along the path of life, Socrates heard and confessed, 
and he always listened to it ; indeed he refused to escape 
from prison, and to avoid death, because the voice had not 
spoken. 

Of course there are many antipathies which appear 
ridiculous, and are unaccountable because we are not suf- 
ficiently aware of the secret springs of Nature. The assertion 
of Pope, that there were some men so fantastical that they 

would 

*' Die of a rose in aromatic pain," 

is quite true. Some persons dislike the smell of roses ; some 
faint and are overcome at the sight of white lilies ; and a 
disease which is well known, and distinctly traced to its 
cause, is hay-fever. When the hay is about, and the dry 



LIKES AND DISLIKES. 253 

grass is seeding, the pollen of the hay perfumes the air, and 
some persons — often farmers and the children of farmers — are 
stricken with a mixture of catarrh and asthma, acutely pain- 
ful, affecting the mucous membrane and the brain. Pro- 
bably many of the wonderful antipathies to the sight of trees, 
flowers, and herbs may have as plain and distinct a cause as 
this, did we but know it. But there are other instances of 
attraction and repulsion in the human breast, which we can- 
not so easily account for. They say that eveiy baby, if put 
quietly into warm water, which would not shock its nerves, 
could swim, and would swim. We can neither affirm this to 
be true nor untrue. Man can do almost anything if he so 
wills it. Fear sends many a good fellow to the bottom ; 
but, would any baby handle a snake ? Is there not really an 
antipathy been man and such reptiles, dating from the time 
when God put enmity between the serpent and man. Brave 
as a man may be, he would not choose to handle an adder, 
nor to gambol with a cobra di capello. There is something- 
very repugnant in the snake tribe ; even those water snakes, 
the eels, affect some persons in a strange way, and this not 
through education, but from a natural feeling. Boys, who 
are strange creatures, soon overcome their repugnance to 
snakes, and may be seen petting the harmless yellow and 
black snake of our fields ; and Hindoos will, as we know, 
remove the poison-bag of the most venomous whip snakes, 
and amuse themselves by putting the snake's head in their 



254 THE BETTER SELF. 

mouth, or letting it nestle under their arms. Some women 
have a great abhorrence of worms, some of mice or of rats, 
many faint at the sight of blood; and great heroes have, 
even in moments of courage and trial, exhibited much that 
seemed puerile and cowardly, but which was the effect of 
prejudice or antipathies. 

Not only are many antagonisms and prejudices perfectly 
reasonable and respectable, but all honest men and women 
must in their course of life be bound to undertake them. 
There does come a time when we are no longer allowed to 
be on a debatable ground. We must be a king's man or a 
commonwealth man ; we must be on the side of vice or 
virtue; we must be either for God or for the devil. Politeness 
is a very nice thing, but strong eartnestness is much better. 
When that time comes we must not be afraid of offending; no 
temporizing will do any good ; we must declare our opinions 
firmly and faithfully; and if people like to say that we are 
prejudiced, and have antagonisms and antipathies, let them 
say so. We need not be ashamed of confessing, even in 
this day of small things, this hour of negation, this period of 
the fusion aad confusion of creeds, that we are antagonistic 
to all that is not good, and have a very decided antipathy to 
things hurtful, and especially to the devil's regiment of the 
line, whether a man holds a commission in that corps, or 
serves in it merely as full private. 



( 255 ) 



XXIV. 

ON FALLING OUT. 

In one of the most agreeable papers in the Tatkr, a work 
but seldom read at present, there is an account of two 
ladies — Lady Autumn and Lady Springly — at Epsom Wells. 
The very names of the persons and the place set you 
down at the beginning of the last century (anno 1709) 
in the midst of hoops, patches, flowered silks, powdered 
hair, lace ruffles, toupees, side curls, swords, high-heeled 
shoes, and broad-skirted coats. 

The two good ladies of quality are staying at the 
watering-place we have named, and at a time when Epsom 
Wells was really the new queen of fashion. As the names 
indicate. Lady Springly is of the new school. Lady Autumn 
is of the old — a dame who knows her place and who she is ; 
" a person of good Breeding, Formality, and a singular Way 
practised in the last Age." All last ages have the singular 
way in the eyes of their successors. What do we now think 
of the Springlys of 1709? Both these ladies are the wives 
of baronets, " both knights," says Steele. Springly is the 



256 THE BETTER SELF. 

spouse of the elder, who is a baronet ; and Autumn, being a 
rich widow, has taken his younger brother, and out of her 
purse endowed him with an equal fortune and a knighthood 
of the same order. 

This fact points to the time when rich men could not 
only buy titles, but were often forced to do so, or fined for 
the omission, the fine going to the king. 

So then the two knights-baronet and their ladies go to 
see a race at Epsom Wells. Several " damsels swift of foot 
are to run for a suit of head-clothes at the Old Wells," and 
the " governor of Epsom and all his court of citizens " (the 
mayor that is and the clerk of the course, &c.) are there 
assembled. A " brisk young spark," as sparks often do, 
sets fire to the glowing bosoms of the two ladies. He offers 
to conduct Lady Springly to her seat in the stand yfri*^/ and 
this so disgusts Lady Autumn, who knows what precedence 
is, that she rushes back to her coach, drives to her husband, 
where, after the races are over, Lady Springly and all the 
considerable people come to tell her the result. "You 
know," says the Tatler, "a premeditated quarrel always 
begins with the words ^some people.' Therefore, as is 
natural, the elder of these ladies begins : * There are 

people who fancy that if some people .^ Hereupon 

Springly takes her up : * There are some people who fancy 

that if other people ' Then Lady Autumn cries, in her 

turn, ' People give themselves airs ; but if other people who 



ON FALLING OUT. 257 

make less ado could be as agreeable as so77te people.' " 
And so the two ladies " nag " at each other until the elder 
boxes the younger one's ears ; the younger one returns the 
cuff; the two brother baronets interfere to protect their 
wives, and begin themselves to fight. Periwigs are knocked 
off, and cravats are torn ; the governor and the rest of the 
citizens interpose ; and according to the slip-knot of matri- 
mony, which makes it law for husband and wife to draw 
together when they are attacked separately by others, 
**the tvvo ladies and their husbands fell upon the rest of 
the company; and, having beaten all their Friends and 
Relations out of the House, came to themselves just time 
enough to know that there was no bearing the Jest after 
these adventures, and therefore marched off the next day. 
It is said," Steele dryly adds, " that the governor had 
procured several legs of mutton (the celebrated Banstead 
mutton, then, as now, famous) and other dishes, exquisitely 
dressed, to bring them (the ladies) down again." 

This pleasant little story will show that rich and well- 
bred people quarrel, and how very much they are like low 
and vulgar people when they do so. All excitement 
equalizes people. Sentiment, anguish, joy, laughter, and 
tears, bring us down to the same level. A pit full of kings 
crying at a tragedy would be just as good or ill looking as 
a pit full of 'prentice boys. So when people quarrel in a 
violent way they are all vulgar alike, whether they be 

s 



258 THE BETTER SELF. 

duchesses or dowager cheesemongers from Drury Lane. 
What is true of one kind of Hfe is true of the other. " One 
touch of Nature " (and passions reveal Nature) ^' makes 
the whole world kin." 

Of all the avoidable causes of misery in this world, and 
there are a great many, quarrelling is the most fertile and 
the most deadly. There is truth in the old saw—" It takes 
two people to make a quarrel." That is, ordinarily two 
people ; but one can commence it, or " pick it," as we say. 
Foxe, in his "Acts and Monuments of these Latter and 
Perilous Dayes " (the Book of Martyrs) tells us to have 
nothing to do " with the whole brood of such whisperers, 
railers, quarrel-pickers, corner-creepers, fault-finders, and 
spider-catchers, or by what name soever they are to be 
titled ; " and it would be a happy thing if we could pass 
them by. But the nature of man will not allow it. Love, 
which mends quarrels, also increases them. "There are 
two kinds of quarrellers," says an. old play, "your drunkards 
and your lovers. Your drunkard is quarrelsome ; so is your 
lover." The reason is, because they are both under the 
influence of excitement, though of different kinds. The 
gentlest young lady of all England will pick a quarrel with 
her lover, especially if she is very fond of him, if only for 
the purpose of making it up. But if the unfortunate be too 
late at an appointment, if he be inattentive to her or 
attentive to another, then the dogs of war are let slip 



ON FALLING OUT. 259 

indeed, and one of those sharp and bitter engagements 
called " lovers' quarrels " takes place, followed first by a 
sweet truce, and then too often by a more bitter quarrel. 
For the nature of mankind is this, that he — and especially 
she — will often delight in a boisterous quarrel, upon the 
very basis on which peace was to be built. " My darling,'' 
said a lover, " I will own I am in the wrong." " Oh you 
are, are you, sir? Then you must be guilty if you own 
that ; " and forthwith the old reproaches were renewed, and 
the lady indulged in the luxury of making herself and the 
one whom she loved supremely unhappy. There is a story 
of a separation which took place because a husband said, 
" My dear, here is a little present I have brought to make 
you good-tempered." "Sir," was the indignant reply, "do 
you dare to say that it is necessary to bribe me into being 
good-tempered ? Why, I am always good-tempered : it is 
your violent temper, sir ! " And so the quarrel went on. 
Whatever we are conscious that we are ourselves most 
guilty of, we impute to others. 

What pleasure ordinaiy persons can find in constant 
wranglings it is hard to say; possibly it may be the satis- 
faction of having a pretext for saying that the persons they 
disagree with ill-use them. There are many who are like 
the celebrated Chuzzlewit family, which never met without 
having a " regular row " all round ; and the excellence of 
Dickens's picture, drawn as it was from nature, will be seen 



26o THE BETTER SELF. 

if we compare it with our own families. In our own circle, 
let us say, which is of course a very peaceful one, there is 
an Uncle George who objects to an Aunt Eliza, or a Mrs. 
Smith-Brown, who looks down upon certain younger Browns 
"who never ought to have come into the family, you know." 
The firebrand of the clan, who, having a tremendous 
temper, gets his or her own way, is of course unjustly 
deferred to. The lamb among us who gives the party, and 
who is delighted, and never so much delighted as when 
he assembles them all together, usually gushes with some 
homely sentiment, as " How delightful it is to be all to- 
gether ! How well Aunt Eliza looks ! " " Some people may 
think so," cries the firebrand, and the querulous temper 
shows itself, and the quarrel begins. It is usually on the 
most foolish trivial matter : a point of etiquette, the better 
place, being served first at the family feast. And then, as 
vulgar people say, " the fat's in the fire," it blazes up, and 
peace flies away. As a rule, family parties are a mistake, 
especially if the family be large. Some are not asked, 
others are not introduced to the chief guest ; the professing 
lamb, who says, " Never mind me, old fellow, put me any- 
where," is stung to madness because he has not had the 
best bed-room, or the seat at the right hand of the hostess ; 
the children have remarked that Mr. Smith-Brovv^n is grow- 
ing bald or getting stout, or the servants have taken away 
Aunt Jane's plate — Aunt Jane has an appetite — ^just as she 



ON FALLING OUT. 261 

was about to finish the tender morsel she had saved for a 

last bonne bonche, ''The way I lost my fortune, sir — my 

uncle had left it me — was this," said one. '' I gave a family 

party. Uncle was there, and all the rest of us ; all were so 

civil to the old gentleman that he got bored, and I finished 

the matter by giving him the liver wing of a roast fowl, when 

he preferred the breast and the thigh of a boiled turkey. He 

had set his heart on that turkey, and he altered his will." 

Says the Psalmist, " Behold, how good and how pleasant 

it is for brethren to dwell together in unity ! " It is because 

it is a very rare thing, that the inspired writer makes a note 

of it. 

As life is constituted, these discordant interruptions must 

come, like other offences. After they have come — and woe 

to those by whom they come — most of us can see how 

trivial and foolish are their causes. But we all of us must 

quarrel many times in our life. It is the essence of wisdom, 

of course, to — 

** Beware 
Of entrance to a quarrel ; but being in, 
Bear it, that the opposed may beware of thee." 

And upon reflection, if we are wise, we shall find that the 
best thing we can do when we are in a quarrel is to get out 
of it as soon as we can. Generally, like wars, which are 
quarrels on a large scale brought to a bloody head, they 
offer many times opportunities of escape. When the Franco- 



262 THE BETTER SELF. 

German war was declared there were two several occasions 
upon which Napoleon III. might have retired with honour : 
one, when the Prince of Hohenzollern withdrew from his 
candidature to the throne of Spain ; one, when the King of 
Prussia gave a pacific answer to the demands of France. A 
peaceable sovereign is always a wise one. Had Napoleon 
been really wise, he might have concluded with merely a 
show of war, and have plumed himself and the French 
nation on his magnanimity and his bloodless victory. As 
it is, he and the nation had to put up with many disastrous 
defeats, and the Napoleon of Peace was only about as 
peaceful as that character in Charles Reade's novel, who 
cries " I am a man of peace ; and, damme, I'll punch any 
man's head for a halfpenny." 

Quarrelsome and angry people are unlike iron ; they are 
worse, says Fuller, " to be wrought upon when they are 
hot." And such persons are generally unjust, full of self- 
seeking and self-opinion, arrogant, and not seldom unfor- 
giving. When two such come together as husband and 
wife, their whole life will be poisoned by senseless, vain 
wrangling ; for to quarrel with any one is a grave offence. 
There is a wise observation of Goldsmith's which should 
be remembered by such irritable persons. " Whatever," 
he says, '' mitigates the woes and increases the happiness 
of others is a just criterion of goodness ; and whatever 
injures society at large, or any individual in it, is a criterion 



ON FALLING OUT. 263 

of iniquity. One should not quarrel with a dog without 
reason sufficient to vindicate one through all the courts 
of morality." 

Irritable and querulous persons are just as much to 
be avoided as small pox or scarlet fever. There are mental 
epidemics, which are terribly dangerous, and quarrelling is 
one of them. We are almost sure to catch it if long ex- 
posed to its contagion. A man should wisely avoid a 
woman as a wife who has been brought up in a narrow 
family with mean and unhappy views of things, who are 
ever ready to envy and find fault with their neighbours, 
and to quarrel among themselves. Such a family is to 
be avoided, and so too is the tempting part of interfering 
in a *^row," especially if we do not accurately know its 
origin. Whatever side we take in such a case, we are 
sure to offend one party, and most likely both, for the 
'' benevolent neutral " never espouses either side as warmly 
as he might do. Ga/s homely verse should ever be a 
beacon light for all peace-loving people — 

** Those who in quarrels interpose, 
Must often wipe a bloody nose,' 

especially if the dispute be a family one, between relations 

or between husband and wife. 

But after all that has been and will be said against this 

iniquitous folly, there is much to be said, by all of us, too, 

against the cold-blooded, peaceable fellow who never " gets 



264 THE BETTER SELF. 

into a row," submits to everything, and keeps himself cool 
while others are at the boiling point. No doubt it is scrip- 
tural to advise a man when he is slapped on one cheek to 
turn the other, and if he is robbed of his coat to let the 
thief take his cloak also. Practically we believe that the 
wdsdom of such a course would be vindicated; but the 
world is by far too selfish and uncivilized to bear the 
practice. What man of us is there who would, after a 
thief had stolen his wrapper from his hall, open his ward- 
robe and say, " Sir, behold, there are my waistcoats, my best 
black coat, and my go-to-meeting trousers." What generous 
people like is one who can quarrel when occasion serves, 
and, after expressing himself warmly, can easily forgive — 
a man who, like the noble Brutus, " carries anger as the 
flint does fire," but never shows the gleaming spark until 
sharply struck. And there are some wise men who have 
vindicated, as we often try to do, the right to be angry. 
" Be angry, and sin not," is Holy Writ ; and quaint Andrew 
Fuller says that " anger is one of the sinews of the soul ; he 
that wants it hath a maimed mind, and, with Jacob, sinew 
shrunk in the hollow of his thigh, must needs halt. Nor 
is it good to converse w^ith such as cannot be angry, and, 
with the Caspian Sea, never ebb nor flow." If, therefore, 
occasion serve to have a quarrel with any one, the best plan 
is to do it and have done with it. Do not nurse your wrath 
to keep it warm. Do not chew the cud of bitter revenge, 



ON FALLING OUT. 265 

and when your opponent has forgotten the cicumstance, pop 
out upon him hke a masked mitrailleuse and blow him to 
pieces with a hundred reproaches. This is unfortunately 
too often the manner of women, and a fruitful cause of 
matrimonial misery. Anger kept till the next morning is like 
the manna of the Jews, or shell-fish at Midsummer. It 
will putrefy and corrupt ; it will injure and poison ; it 
rankles in the mind of the angry one. " Let not the sun 
go down upon your wrath," is merciful as well as spiritual, 
for as one we have quoted says — he cites from Ephes. 
iv. 2 7, though not in the exact words — " He that keepeth 
anger long in his bosom giveth place to the devil. And 
why should we make room for him, who will creep in too 
fast of himself ? " 

Why indeed ?v The miserable result of undue anger 
and quarrelling, a result always to be deplored, and yet 
always sure to come with constant indulgence, is, that we 
sometimes, in a moment, and when least thought of, do 
what Ve never forget, always regret, and never can undo. 
At first we are bitter and reproachful, but we rule our 
tongues and the breach is healed ; the divergence again 
brought home, the gulf bridged over. We are like Samson : 
we fall, our secret is known, and our hair cut, but it grows 
again, and our strength returns ; but after some bitter 
quarrels we in our blindness are like Samson with his eyes 
put out Our hair may grow again, but our eyes never. 



266 THE BETTER SELF. 

And so it is with a friend : a slight disturbance of love, 
a disagreement, a coldness, and angry quarrel — and the 
word is said, seldom forgiven, never forgotten, and the 
friend is lost for ever 1 



( 267 ) 



XXV. 

PRETENSION AND SENTIMENT. 

Neither of these are very openly prominent in the present 
day ; in fact, the vice is to pretend to be without pretence, 
and to affect to despise sentiment. But we need scarcely 
say they are as powerful as ever, especially in religious 
or serious families, and they will be for ever powerful. 
There is always a sneaking kindness for a neat sentence. 
When Joseph Surface, in the comedy, has hidden Lady 
Teazle behind the screen, her husband, little knowing the 
cheat, declaims to him on the beauties of sentiment. " The 
heart," says the hypocritical Joseph, "that is conscious of 
its own integrity is ever slow to credit another's treachery." 
Thus he pretends to repudiate the notion that his innocent 
brother can be the offender of whom Sir Peter is in search. 
"Oh!" cries the unsuspecting husband, "true; but your 
brother has no sentiment — you never hear him talk so." 
When, however, the screen falls, and the s.lly but not guilty 
wife is discovered, and the hypocrite is unmasked, Sir Peter 
does not think so much of fine speeches. "The man," 



268 THE BETTER SELF. 

cries Joseph, endeavouring to palliate his guilt, " who shuts 

out conviction by refusing to hear '^ '^ O d your 

sentiment ! " cries the enraged knight, and hurries awa/ 
from the convicted hypocrite. 

That scene of the dramatist is so true to life, that we 
have occasion to recall it every day. People have, for 
some time, learnt to *^ damn " sentiment very heartily ; and 
yet on the library shelves of almost every country house we 
have *^The Beauties of Sentiment," "The Man of Feeling," 
^^The Sentimental Journey," and other works in which sen- 
timent plays a very pretty part. To be sure, also, we have 
some authors of the present time who have taken sentiment 
under their care, and have given us sentimental highway- 
men and philosophic murderers, who rob a man with a neat 
sentence, and murder him with a smile of pitying and 
supreme philosophy. When Eugene Aram defends himself 
for murdering Daniel Clarke, he does it sentimentally. 
" What," he seems to say, " what (oh, you mean hunks !) 
have you to do with riches? I love the Beautiful, the 
Free, the Lovely (all with big letters). I bow to the Shrine 
of Knowledge. I am a pupil of Philosophy ; you are a 
dense and stupid Ass." 

And as the about-to-be-murdered person very selfishly 
objects to give up all his moneys, the sentimental murderer 
kills him. Of course, as Thackeray says with a sneer, the 
above is a nice doctrine for the worshippers of the Beautiful 



PRETENSION AND SENTIMENT. 269 

and the True ; but it does not do for the ^vorId, The 
mere plodder, who makes his money honestly, objects to 
have it knocked out of his hand by a conceited prig, who 
fancies he can use it better than he can. Again, senti- 
mental highwaymen rob a Mr. Jones, who is a very rich 
fellow, to relieve Mr. Brown, who is a very poor fellow; 
and somehow consider that they are doing God service, 
forgetting the words spoken by the prophet, "I, the Lord, 
hate robbery for a burnt-offering." 

From Robin Hood downwards this seems to have been 
always the case. A man does wrong and invests it with 
" sentiment ; " and the common people, who (bless their 
innocent hearts !) always find something to excuse sinners, 
believe in them ; nay, people quarrel about the precedence 
and importance of their rogues : — 

** A famous man was Robin Hood, 
The English ballad singei's joy ; 
But Scotland has a thief as good : 
She has, she has her own Rob Roy.** 

And so, Red Robert and Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, 
in ballad history, dispute the headship of roguery; whereas, 
in police cases of the present day, they would have figured 
as a couple of disreputable sheep stealers and cattle-lifters, 
who deserved hanging. Sentiment, in fact, has made 
thieves heroes of romance before now, and will do so 
again. 



270 THE BETTER SELF. 

What is this sentunent, then? Sentiment is feeling, 
and as a rule is opposed to reason. A man who acts by 
sentiment acts as a woman, and reasons, not from his 
head, but from his heart. Now, when the man's heart is 
better than his head, which is not an uncommon case at 
all, this is very well ; but when a man's heart is deceitful 
beyond measure, when his opinion is biased unfairly by 
his feeling, when self enters into all his calculations, it 
is as well to call in the aid of reason ; for, though it 
may seem paradoxical, some of the most sentimental 
people have been the most cruel and terrible. The sen- 
timentalism of Rousseau nobody would dispute ; and yet 
can any one hold up such a man to anything but con- 
tempt and detestation? Diderot, again, was a man of 
sentiment; and Robespierre also had intense and acute 
sentiment ; so good that, when young, he was a continual 
advocate for the poor, and without taking any money 
from them, he spent days and nights in their service. 
At last sentimentalism, logically produced, drove him 
into the most cruel excesses. *^We must not mind 
cracking eggs," said he, ''when we w^ant an omelet;" and 
truly he cracked eggs enough, if we count the heads he 
cut off 

With us Sterne, the author of "The Sentimental Jour- 
ney," is the representative man of this kind of literature, and 
we are told that he cared more for a dead ass than he 



PRETENSION AND SENTIMENT. 271 

did for a live wife or mother. But Sterne is a much 
misrepresented man. Although he was one of the greatest 
masters of thought, suggestion, and style that ever lived, 
a bitter envy has pursued him, and the critics seem to 
hate him because they cannot understand him. Dickens, 
again, is a thoroughly sentimental writer. Tom Pinch, the 
Nicklebys, brother and sister, the Cheerybles, the Ded- 
locks, and a whole tribe of his people, from Trotty Veck 
upwards, are sentimentalists ] his very ghosts are senti- 
mental. All his characters are either sentimentalists or 
pantomimic, or both, which is frequently the case. Even 
old Scrooge, when he gets rid of his sentimental miserdom, 
becomes sentimentally generous, and sends a little boy to 
buy the biggest turkey and the biggest pudding, and so 
on, to give it to the poor family he has been starving 
by under-paying the father. Sentiment is not very healthy. 
Mrs. Dombey runs away with Mr. Carker, not because 
she loves him, for she hates him with a most bitter hate, 
but because she dislkes the cold manners of her too 
respectable husband. In fact she cuts off her nose to 
spite her face, which is the very essence of sentiment. 
Stupid as this feeling is, it is all-powerful. It would be 
absurd and untrue to say that people like Mrs. Dombey 
have not existed, when we meet with them every day. 
There are an immense number of sentimental murderers, 
people with spoiled tempers, whom a good whipping, or 



272 THE BETTER S2LF. 

at most ten good whippings when young, would have 
cure J. Thus Mr. George Victor Townley,* finding that 
a young lady does him grievous wrong in first accepting 
and then rejecting him, quietly— hke an educated gentle- 
men as he was — ascertains this firom her own lips, then 
cuts her throat, follows the body home, sentimentally 
weeping, takes a meal with the grandfather while the police 
are sent for, is condemned for murder, and sentimentally, 
as we hold, pardoned or sentenced for life ; and finally, 
knowing that the law w^on't kill him, kills himself by 
jumping down a well staircase in prison. The man as a 
scholar and a son was good. He was sober, temperate, 
and chaste ; a firm lover as we have seen, honest, indus- 
trious, patient, able to live on little, an admirable citizen, 
and a gentleman. He wept as he slew his victim ; gave 
no man trouble, aided the police and the warders, knew 
exactly where, how, and what he was doing anything for, 
but was unable to discriminate that the woman who had 
first encouraged, and then had thrown him off, was worth- 
less, and that he for her was throwing a valuable life away. 
Had he at school been taught patience, and a proper 
control over disappointment, his sad history would never 

* Some of our readers may remember that Mr. Townley was a 
gentleman of position and education, who deUberately murdered his 
sweetheart, gave himself up, and as deliberately had tea with the 
girl's grandfather while a policeman was being fetched. 



PRETENSION AND SENTIMENT. 273 

have been written, nor would he have rushed into the 
presence of his Maker with two murders on his head, — 
those of two whom he best loved, himself and his sweet 
heart. 

Sentiment, Skinner says, is a new word, but it is not 
so now nor was it then. Chaucer uses it as we use it, 
or rather as we ought properly to use it. " I here this 
endite of no seniimente^ not as my own thoughts, not as 
my own invention, but from the Latin." That is, he did 
not arrange and think out the plot of the story, nor was 
it born of his heart and feeling, but he re-lated from the 
Latin. Derived from sentir^ to perceive, to feel, the 
sentiment grew to mean rather an intuition than a cold 
effort of reason. And in this way a sentimental passion, 
a love for what we admire, was always presumed to be 
a grand one. Not to the coldly reasoning world, not to 
the jargon of the schools, nor the stilled and quieted 
murmur of the priests, would all listen ; the young and 
the ardent still obeyed the dictates of the heart, and still 
believed that which it taught them. And they were in 
many cases right. 

** Thanks to the human heart, by which we live, 
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, its fears, 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

So sings Wordsworth; and who will dare to gamsay his 

T 



274 THE BETTER SELF. 

teaching? Poets will always be sentimental in the true 
sense ; if they were so in the false sense they would cease 
to be manly. 

True feeling of this kind is always delightful. Thus 
Mackenzie is quite right when he says, "In books, whether 
moral or amusing, there are no passages more captivating 
than those delicate strokes of sentimental morality which 
refer our actions to the determination of feeling." The 
romantic school, the very essence of tragedy, does this. It 
is by the heart and feeling, not through the head, that we 
are terrified, appalled, spell-bound, and entranced at a 
tragedy. What to us are the wrongs of Desdemona, and 
the slights and scorns of Hamlet, but thorough sentiment? 
In reality, did we, like the Hindoo and the contemplative 
Brahmin, deaden every feeling in Positivist Quietism, we 
should accept everything as good. ^" Let God govern the 
world," we should say; "let this m-^n die or that man reign 
in glory; let the rogue flourish, and the villain rule; an after 
life will make these odds all even. There is no paid lawyer 
in the court of God ; there each must plead his cause, and 
the damning acts of life will bear witness against him." ; But 
we are enlisted on the side of that which we think or know 
to be good ; we are mere puppets in the hands of the philo- 
sophic Master Shakspere, who knows how to mix the finest 
reflections with the most subtle sentiment. But in real life, 
that which enlists us on the side of the virtuous man in the 



PRETENSION AND SENTIMENT. 275 

play, enlists vlt, on what we believe to be the right side. 

While the actor declaimed, says a modern verse writer — 

** 4mong the crowd new hero feelings ran, 
And the slave listen'd till he rose a man." 

But while the political writer is exercising his pen, we are 
entangled in the meshes of the sophistry he spreads, and take 
our side without exactly knowing whether he is right or not. 
In the Russian War of 1852-4 the hearts of the whole people 
were enlisted on the side of the Turks and against the 
Russians through mere sentimentalism. W^e do not say that 
it was not right. Most of us felt and thought and wrote 
on the side of our countrymen, and many rose early, and ran 
with others full of ardent feelings, by the side of the Guards 
as they marched over Waterloo Bridge. What a shaking of 
hands there was ! How the officers kissed the dear girls 
who came to see them off ! and how the grim old sergeants 
gazed with moist eyes at the boys and girls who would 
never greet them more ! 

The time is past now. Those gallant men lie dead 
beneath Crimean snow. Somebody blundered and hun- 
dreds were starved. The men and officers fought like heroes, 
shoulder to shoulder ; and nothing was more touching than 
the constant instance of an officer jumping out, running 
along the open, and carrying off a wounded soldier from 
under the fire of the enemy, or of a soldier so carrying his 
officer. Perhaps it was well that we so fought, and spent so 



276 THE BETTER SELF. 

many millions; but there are many acute reasoners who 
believe that, had we listened to Russia, and put pressure on 
the Turk, we might now have been governing Egypt wisely 
and well, and employing thousands of our poor, giving the 
fellahs and native Christians sound and wholesome laws, 
repressing the Moslem; while the Russians, seated on the 
Bosphorus, would have made Constantinople the seat of the 
Patriarch, restored St. Sophia to what it was built for (a 
cathedral), would have driven the Turks into Asia Minor, 
and have saved the long threatened attack up^n our Eastern 
empire. But the war was inevitable, in spite of the grief 
of Lord Aberdeen, the English Prime Minister, and our 
rulers, because of the sentiment of the people. So was it 
in that other extraordinary emetite, wherein, by the death of 
one million excellent and intelligent whites in America, the 
disruption of society, and the inception of a military ~auto- 
cracy, three millions of not intelligent blacks were given to 
an abused freedom, and a very probable starvation. The 
South lost the battle because it did not appeal to the senii- 
ment of Europe by freeing the slaves. The North did play 
that card, and won. 

No one can afford to despise sentiment ; but most of us 
despise sentimentalism. " Since the close of what we may 
call the Byronic period of our literature," says Douglas 
Jerrold, " there has been an increasing reaction against the 
school of sentiment. This reaction, we conceive, is at pre- 



PRETENSION AND SENTIMENT. 277 

sent carried to excess. In the recoil from the morbid and 
falsely heroic are we not falling into the opposite error of 
considering everything morbid that aspires to be heroic?" 
. . . . "Men who fight the battle of right without cal- 
culating the odds, women who rate men by their manhood 
rather than by their bankers' accounts are, thank God, 
nowise rare. By a law of natural magnetism, they draw 
round them all that is best and healthiest in the sympathies 
of others; while in themselves they have the abiding youth 
which creates joy where it does not find it, and gains strength 
and trust from adversity." Excess of this emotion, which is 
its bane, has its origin in laziness; "the hand of little em- 
ployment hath the more delicate sense," and the head which 
is little exercised with knowledge will run into the strangest 
vagaries. One could make the ladies of a village weep by a 
picture of the nakedness of the benighted savage, or oi the 
sad condition of the poor things because they had not flannel 
jackets and pocket-handkerchiefs; but the' knowledge that 
niggers in their natural state are a great deal too hot in their 
bare skins, and dispense generally with the finical custom 01 
blowing their noses, might correct the effusion o. maidenly 
tears. If people had clearness of vision and faith in the 
Over-ruling Power, there would be but little foolish sentiment. 
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb ; and there is no 
position in life that has not its advantages and its pleasures. 
Perhaps the nigger, when he sees the white man at the Line 



278 THE BETTER SELF. 

panting with the heat which blacks enjoy, pities him; cer- 
tainly he is sentimental over our white skins, for he makes his 
devil of our colour, as if the complexion of Apollo were an 
odious livery ! (When Lady Mary Wortley Montague went 
into the Turkish harem, the wives of the Turk crowded 
round the lady, and playing, laughing, and full of fun, hurried 
her to the bath, where she saw so many beautiful forms that 
she quite forgot the faces of those beauties who urged her 
to bathe with them. But, in undressing her, they came to 
her stays, and recoiled with horror ! Then it was that they 
wept and grew sentimental. ( In this prison of iron and 
whalebone, then, it was that JEuropean husbands of the West 
confined their hapless wives ! Nothing that the lady could 
do could save her from this sentimental pity. Who was 
mo3t in the right ? It is not difficult to decide. Lady Mary 
preferred travelling abroad — one wife with one husband, and 
shutting up her ribs with stays ; the Sultanas were content 
with being shut up at homie — many wives with but a small 
share of one husband. Knowledge may correct sentiment, 
for the degree of human happiness depends upon ethical 
rules; but sentiment can also correct knowledge, for the 
tenderest feelings arise from the heart. 



C 279 ; 



XXVI. 

FALSE PRETENCES. 

A LADY of education and intelligence lately offered to a firm 
of publishers some moral tales for children. The tales, we 
presume, were neither very striking nor very original, and 
would never have been cited here but for one memorable 
plea in their favour. The lady was a Roman Catholic, 
the publishers strictly Protestant ; but that had nothing to 
do with the stories or their rejection. The plea that the 
lady urged, and that the bookseller looked on with great 
favour, was this : " My dear sir, there is not one farthing's- 
worth of religion in the stories at all ! — not a sentence, not 
a word. It is all purposely excluded." 

" Exactly so, madam," said the publisher ; " an excellent 
idea. I shall most gladly place the work in the hands of 
my reader. We are deluged with religious stories. We 
want something else, moral and pretty, but without Scrip- 
ture citations." 

" Precisely, my dear sir, — my ovm, idea," cried the lady. 
" You see, I found out all this from seeing many children 



28o THE BETTER SELF. 

and finding out how they loathe all this. A little boy came 
to his mother the other day with a religious story-book and 
said, ' Oh, mamma, do give me another book.' * Why, my 
dear, it's all about the Sav -' ' Yes, I know it is,' whim- 
pered the child, 'and that's why I hate it, T77i sick of 
Jesus!''' 

A dreadful story, you say; yet a true one, and not 
dreadful. We must face the truth. Here is a little child 
using the same thought, almost tHe same words, as did 
Voltaire on his deathbed. Voltaire, an abbe, a priest 
himself, nay a bishop, some say, turns away from the offi- 
ciating and officious priest who pesters him at his bedside, 
and almost in the agonies of death cries out, " I'm sick and 
tired of this perpetual cry ; ne parlez pas de cet iiifame I " 
The allusion was to our Saviour. No one has attempted 
to vindicate Voltaire's last saying, though we might easily 
presume that the philosopher said enfant (child) instead 
of infanie^ — the Mighty and Righteous Judge, co-equal with 
the Father, the Pillar of Fire, the Protecting Cloud, the 
Eternal One, who was from the beginning, being throughout 
Roman Catholic countries symbolized as a little child on 
the arm of his mother, and being too often thought of as a 
child. 

But whatever Voltaire said, it is very well known that 
he rejected the Church, and would not by any means listen to 
her ministration. But why should a child sicken at a story. 



FALSE PRETENCES, 281 

the most wonderful, romantic, touching, simple, beautiful, and 
full of the truest touches of genius in the world ? A popular 
author, who often refers to it, as an unwavering believer, 
seldom does so without drawing tears, — sweet, humble, grate- 
ful tears. Voltaire himself more than once, like John Stuart 
Mill, drew a very flattering picture of the Saviour. His more 
learned disciple, Renan, is filled with admiration of the 
character. No man, indeed, can know all the panegyric 
which Christian bishops and philosophical doubters have 
lavished on the Divine character; and indeed, truly pre- 
sented to man, it has in it all that man can love. The 
hatred to it can only arise from a mistake — a mistake the 
most serious in the world — and that is the terribly common, 
every-day error of teaching religion upon false pretences, 
and thrusting, as preachers often do, false views of goodness, 
false rewards, false tales and stories, upon the world, 
especially upon the world of the young. 

This pious fraud seems to be inherent in humanity. 
Poor Humanity ! it is as weak as a sick woman ; and having, 
as it supposes, a bad bargain, seeks to make the best of it. 
" Pious frauds " — the gist of which is that it is legitimate to 
tell a lie to back up the truth — arose with the priests ; but 
they are by no means confined to them. Here, step 
forward, honest William Hogarth, prime genius of England's 
painters, perfect Englishman, sound Protestant, most honest 
good man as you are, and we know you are, and say how it 



282 THE BETTER SELF. 

was you ever gave to the world that pious fraud of yours 
the industrious and idle apprentices. You knew well enough 
that the tares grow with the wheat till the harvest, and that 
an industrious man does but seldom become Lord Mayor, 
nor does the idle rogue always get sentenced to the gallows. 
A more sceptical and acute, though an infinitely less-gifted 
artist, did a series of badly drawn but cleverly conceived 
sketches, in which the idle cheat becomes Lord Mayor, and 
the industrious, honest boy is reduced to the workhouse. 
One is just as true as the other. *' Goodness and greatness 
are not means, but ends/' If you are good and great upon 
fifty pounds a year — and you may be very good and very 
great and just so poor — you have your reward ; you do not 
want to be made Lord Mayor, or alderman, or a baronet, or 
anything else. So again in these pious tales, in which you 
hear of little children writing letters to Jesus Christ, and of 
good men being rewarded with roast legs of mutton, what 
are they but false pretences ? They are not a whit better 
than AlbanButler's ^' Lives of the Saints,'^ in which it is related 
that poor St. Rosalia, having given away her old shoes 
to a beggar, the Blessed Virgin Mary put her hand out oi 
heaven and gave her a magnificently-jewelled pair! Let a 
child find out that fraud, and what faith will he have ? So 
about punishment : Mrs. Stowe relates of a child, that he 
had a great temptation to swear, and he did so. Tom 
retired to a room and said the word " d ! " and felt 



FALSE PRETENCES, 283 

rather disappointed that the earth did not open, and that 
the Lord took no immediate notice of his sin. Perhaps 
Mrs. Stowe could not in fewer words have more acutely 
pointed out the origin of much of the scepticism of the 
world. This continual assertion that right is always might, 
and that goodness comes off with the largest share of the 
apple-pie, is as harmful as it is false. What is true of the 
world is perhaps this — that as a rule, although excellence in 
art and success in trade often accompany goodness, yet the 
best people are the worst paid, the most tried, and the least 
rewarded of all. Pope, lame as he sometimes w^as at a 
moral argument, has had skill enough to tell us why : — 

** But sometimes Virtue starves while Vice is fed. 
What then ? Is the reward of Virtue bread ? 
That Vice may merit, 'tis the price of toil, 
The knave deserves it if he tills the soil. 
What nothing earthly gives, nor can destroy, 
The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy. 
Is Virtue's prize. A better would you fix? 
Then give Humility a. coach and six. . . , 
Vain, foolish man, will Heaven reward us there 
With the same trash mad mortals wish for here? 
Go, like the Indian, in another life 
Expect thy dog, thy brother, and thy wife." 

This satire is strong enough to awaken even the most 
stupid ; and yet how many are there who devote themselves 
to a good life, with the immediate or ultimate expecta- 
tion of an adequate reward — who embrace honesty, not 



284 THE BETTER SELF. 

on account of its intrinsic goodness, but as a policy which 
pays ! 

There are numbers of people who habitually deceive 
children with promises of enjoyment and reward, which 
they know will never come, and thus sow seeds of doubt at 
the very earliest age. Robert Hall, who was ^one of those 
truthful persons who hated a lie, once reproved a young 
mother very severely, because in putting a little baby to bed, 
she put on her own nightcap, and lay down by it till it went 
to sleep. "Madam," said the eloquent preacher, ''you are 
acting a lie, and teaching the child to lie." Yes, and when 
the child had lost its trust in that "mother, it had learnt the 
miserable habit of doubting, which it would never get over. 
It was in vain that the mother pleaded that the child would 
not go to sleep. " That," said Hall, "is nonsense. Properly 
brought up, it must sleep. Make it know what you want ; 
obedience is necessary on its part, but not a lie on yours." 

Going on in life, we cheat ourselves over and over again 
with false pretences, as a drunkard who stops at a fourth 
public-house and treats resolution because he has manfully 
passed three others. A man runs into a lawsuit with his 
neighbour, or upsets a whole community about a foot-path 
right of way, or he gives himself airs at church or chapel, 
and fancies that he is only asserting his rights, and that it is 
proper pride. There are a dozen little ways in which little 
vices creep up our sleeves under false pretences, and we all 



FALSE PRETENCES. 285 

the time know them to be false, but affect to beUeve them to 
be true. Like the man who said he drank — 

** Because I'm wet, because I'm dry^ . 
Or any other reason why," 

we have ahvays an excuse for a neglected duty. " By the 
way, why were you not at such and such a meeting ? " asks 
one. "These roughs have cut down the workhouse tea, 
bread, butter, and meat ; and if you and two or three others 

had been there " Well, we know the excuse. Does 

not every Englishman abuse the jury system, because of 
stupid juries, but does not every man jack of us try to 
escape service ? How many times have we tried to punish 
bribery at elections ! — and yet at every election there are 
hundreds of hands held out for the bribe. And what false 
pretences are given both for giving and taking the money, — 
from five pounds for a pair of baby's shoes, to a fee of fifty 
pounds to a doctor for attending a patient who is not sick; 
from buying a canary bird to giving away a steam-yacht! 
There are a thousand ways of bribery, which our provincial 
brethren laugh at. Some men get so used to this, that they 
think they are doing a noble action in cajoling a man out of 
his vote. " Oh, do let me go and canvass for you ! " said a 
young lady to a candidate. " It is such fun, and I can tell 
such lots of fibs ! " " There is nothing like lying," said Mr. 
Fagg in the comedy ; "but a good lie needs to be supported. 



286 THE BETTER SELF. 

Whenever I draw a bill with one lie, I take care to endorse 
it with another." 

As for false pretences in life, they are innumerable. 
How many very respectable families, take in, let us say, the 
Saintly Sa^ictiim^ not because they read the work, but 
because it looks so well on the table ! How many people 
go to chujTch or chapel simply because it is highly respect- 
able ! '' My dear," said a wife to her husband, " I never 
saw such a man as you are, playing with the children, and 
walking so fast ! People will never think that we have been 
to church !" — "That let the cat out of the bag," cried the 
husband. " Well, and what is the use of going to church if 
we don't have the credit for it ? " is the retort. " What will 
the world say ? " is the thought which makes people dress in 
one way, wear ugly hats, chignons, live in expensive houses, 
worry themselves about other people, and, in short, indulge 
in false pretences. 

Between lovers and friends these abound. A likes B, 
and walks and talks with him. Umph ! does he really like 
B, or does he fancy that B likes him? or are they both 
useful to each other? Some people are very fast friends 
because they meet to talk to each other about themselves. 
They call this unburthening their minds. They delight in 
abusing all the world, with a secret reservation of their two 
dear selves. The very bond of friendship is the thinking 
the same and feeling the same. At school two little chaps 



FALSE PRETENCES. 287 

will get a thrashing together, and while feeling their bumps 
and drying their eyes, a reciprocity of feeling will spring up. 
Little Benjy Jones takes to little Tommy Smith, because 
Jones is the dullest boy in the class except Smith : there is 
a community of feeling, and the two little fellows persuade 
themselves that it is friendship ; but let Smith get on in the 
school — and very dull boys rise sometimes — and Jones's 
heart is stung with jealousy, and the friendship ends. 

As for love, that is a sacred name, a reality, in spite of 
prosaic days ; a necessity, notwithstanding the thirst for 
gold ; a holy thing, in spite of incredulity, want of nobility, 
and the folly of a thousand burlesques ; and yet how much 
of it arises from mere false pretence ! " Two young fools," 
says Dr. Johnson, " are shut up in a room together, and 
told that they are to marry, and fancy that they are in love.'' 
That is when young people marry to . order of parents \ but 
in ordinary cases, the beginning of love is one of the silliest 
and least logical of a man or woman's actions. J looks at 
E while at church ; and E says, " What could he mean by 
looking at me ? " E stares at J in some alarm; and J says to 
his friend, or to himself, " By Jove ! that girl looked as if 
she were interested in me," and looks back again. So the 
entanglement begins. Shakspere, who knew the passion 
thoroughly, as he knew all the human heart, explains all 
this in a charming song, of which the miserable misuse of 
words and drifting of meaning have made the commonalty 



288 THE BETTER SELF. 

lose the sense. Vv^ill not five out of ten of our readers be 
rather surprised to find that Fancy in this song means Love ? 

** Tell me where is Fancy bred, 
Or in the heart, or in the head ? 
How begot, how nourished ? 

It is engender'd in the eyes, 
With gazing fed ; and Fancy dies 
In the cradle where it lies : 

Let us all ring Fancy's knell ; 

I'll begin it,- — Ding, dong, bell.** 

Any one who has heard this song properly harmonized, and 
sung by men, will say at once that it is the perfection of 
lyrical beauty ; but more than that, it is the perfection of 
philosophy ; it is truth. Love (fancy) between man and 
woman begins in the eye, and dies there, where it lies — 
observe the pun — directly it is false, or rather directly its 
falseness is discovered. After that, you may ring Love's 
knell. But in the meantime J is quite taken in with E. 
Like Benedick, he believes the girl loves him ; and he 
cries, '^ Love me ! why it must be requited ! " and he 
returns the fondness. When married people begin to com- 
pare notes, they frequently quarrel as to who fell in love 
first ; and each often dies in the belief that it w^as not 
entered into on the other side. If begun so loosely, can we 
wonder that marriages are so often unhappy? The great 
wonder is that loyalty and aifection can really base them- 



FALSE PRETENCES. 289 

selves upon such slender foundations, and grow up straight 
and true, as they do in a thousand English homes. But 
the result is corrected only for those who are true. There 
are others who believe deceit to be tlfe natural language of 
love. "All is fair in love, war, and poHtics," is the silly 
old cry ; as if we could banish honesty from anything 
without hurt to ourselves ! , Simple honest truth, however, 
is better than all the false pretences in the world. The man 
in Germany who has made a fortune by forging Bass's 
labels, and selling Lagerbier for English pale ale, and the 
thief who marks French cutlery with Sheffield trade marks, 
may grow rich ; but the riches are but Dead Sea fruit, and 
will turn to dust and ashes. But these are open sins : the 
most difficult to be guarded against lie mthin our own 
hearts. How often do we deceive ourselves ! How often 
do we gild over a fault with a noble motive ! How often 
do we call rashness bravery, impudence boldness, folly the 
levity of youth, respectable hypocrisy genuine piety ! How 
many times in the week do we check ourselves in our 
progress towards the Better Self ! How often, in fact, are 
we all the victims of False Pretences 1 



290 THE BETTER SELF. 



XXVII. 

PEACE. 

It Is what we each strive for. It is the end all have in view. 
It is what every conqueror goes to war for; what we all 
quarrel and fight for ; the sum of our ambition ] the answer 
to our prayers. If we cannot get it mentally we at least 
desire it bodily. 

A physician wrote, now some years ago, to the Times, 
pleading with great force for quiet in London streets. 
According to him, we are sending dozens of people every 
year to the lunatic asylum through our noises and racketing 
tumult. There is no time to sleep. The broughams and 
cabs which convey the pleasure seekers from the theatre 
and the evening party keep up the noise till about three 
in the morning, — 

** Home from the ball flash jaded beauty's wheels ; " 

and at that time the market carts begin to pour in ; and 
then post carts, early dust and mud carts, take up the 
noise ; till at six the cabs begin to stir, rattling away with 



PEACE, 291 

enthusiastic excursionists and busy bagmen to the early 
train, while from the train itself the piercing whistle is 
heard, and the snort and grumble of the distant engine 
re-echoes in the streets and squares. 

Next we have the watercresscs, the milk sellers, and 
other early industries, some eccentric street tradesmen and 
women shrieking out '' 'ilk," or " 'meat," with a sudden 
burst, as a poor man complained, as if a penknife had been 
thrust into their backs and had forced out the ejaculation. 
After that there is no peace. In summer the water carts, 
at all times long strings of empty or full carts and waggons, 
calculated with immense ingenuity to make as much noise 
as they possibly can upon nevrly macadamized roads, which 
the parish will not roll smooth, rumble up and down at a 
jog trot, the drivers standing up and yelling out a rude song 
or crashing their whips like pistol shots. Next come the 
boys with iron hoops, and when they see a little dog or an 
old lady they raise a wild Indian scream w^hich shatters the 
nerves to pieces. There is really no peace for Londoners. 
As for the invalids, writes the physician, *^ it is simple 
murder with them." And there is no doubt that he is 
right. Humanity is a poor thing. It requires sleep to 
arrest its decay, " sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of 
care," and modern civilization, in this detestably selfish, weak 
and grovelling age, will not let it have it. 

It is not only in London, but in all country towns that 



292 THE BETTER SELF, 

this game is played. A judge, whom we all respect — for 
happily our judges have achieved that reputation that the 
very culprits themselves have the greatest confidence in 
them — lately complained that he could not hear the wit- 
nesses nor calmly reflect upon the case, because of the 
continual shrieking of a railway engine, and that he and the 
bar were suffering from a sleepless night from the same 
cause. But what did that matter to the railway company ? 
If A, B, and C form themselves into a company, and get a 
Bill through Parliament, have they not a right to bully, ruin, 
and disturb the peace of all the rest of the alphabet ? It 
really seems so now. 

This question of the peace and quiet of all classes 
is a most important one. We are, by depriving rich and 
poor of it, shortening human life, weakening human efforts, 
and destroying human reason ; for a man does not live 
long, nor happily, noj wisely, if he is in a state of war. 
It is neither good for nations nor for men as individuals. 
There was a wise King of England, who has, perhaps 
more than any other monarch, a double reputation. In 
the one he is known as Shakspere's Harry of Richmond, 
a resolute, energetic, and brave hero, who brought happi- 
ness to England by slaying Richard HI. In history he 
is known as a politic, saving, somewhat mean monarch, 
Henry VII. But no one doubts his wisdom ; and his 
prayer for the body-politic was always for peace. Like 



PEACE, 293 

Lord Falkland, he had always the words " peace ! " 
" peace ! " upon his lips ; and it is said never commenced 
a treaty without the words, '' When Christ came into the 
world peace was sung, and when he left it peace was 
bequeathed." 

But we must remember to whom it was bequeathed ; 
that it was only given to men of gentle will. Beyond 
this the very goodness and peace of some is a motive to 
others for aggression. ** I am for peace," said David pro- 
phetically : ^' but when I speak, they make them ready for 
war." A calm, wise man is often mistaken for a coward ; and 
the very way to provoke an insult from some base natures 
is to be as quiet and peaceful as you can. It does not 
speak very well either for European or American politi- 
cians to note that the peaceful policy of Great Britain, 
the only really great Power in the world which embodies 
peace in its political programme, has been construed into 
a sign of weakness and decline. 

Peace of body is of course true health, w^hich the 
wisdom o. the world, of ancient and modern sages, has 
pronounced the greatest of all blessings. In fact there 
is nothing like it. No amount of riches can console one 
for the want of health. It may be thrown away in the 
pursuit of money; but millions of money cannot buy it. 
To attempt to compare money to health is simply folly, — 
the things are not in the same parallel, not upon the 



294 THE BETTER SELF. 

same platform. As to genius, beauty, or power, they will 
not stand the comparison. What can? All these — birth, 
power, beauty, position, youth, all that man covets — are 
subsidiary to health. They are very nice, very pleasant, 
very delightful with it; but they are nothing without it. 
And the more we know of anatomy and physiology, and 
the thousand chords, nerves, arteries, and bones of this 
wonderful house we live in, the more we wonder at having 
on the whole so little the matter with us. Some of our 
great modern philosophers have demonstrated, in an irre- 
fragable way, that Infinite Wisdom should have made us 
perfect, and that this structure of ours should not decay, 
nor grow weary, nor be diseased, nor do anything which 
it ought not to do. Before the fall of man, man was 
doubtless perfect; but when death and disease, and the 
great enemy of peace, sin, came into the world, that 
blessed state gave place to one iii which pain and sick- 
ness wxre to be great teachers, and to serve their turn. 
Aiid now, when we are made so strong and beautiful, we 
cati bnly wonder why we are not made blinder, weaker, 
and smaller. If w^e marvel at our ill health, we also 
wonder at our wondrously constructed bodies, and cry-^-^ 

** Strange that a harp of thousand strings 
Should keep in tune so long ! '' 

We all desire this peace of body, and almost all of us 
can command it, presuming we are riot of those whose trials 



PEACE. ' 29s 

commence before they are born, and who carry in their 
bodies the conquering ensign of hereditary death, and the 
stigma of some incurable disease. To such, the entire 
health and peace of the body is never knowTi ; that blessed 
state which almost all ihe young have ; in which the noble 
animal called man is utterly unconscious of having nerves, 
teeth, a tongue, a heart, a head, a stomach, a throat, a back- 
bone, feet, hands, or indeed anything but a stomach, of 
which he or she is pleasantly reminded by a strong appetite, 
the satisfaction of which three times a day at least, is a pure 
and undiminished pleasure. Those are the days — those the 
rosy hours of life. 

** Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very Heaven. " 

That is what we call peace of body — true peace. When a 
man knows that he has a head upon his shoulders, by rack- 
ing thoughts, which make it ache, and a heart, by the 
remorse which tears it, the unrequited love which wounds it, 
and the sorrow which makes it quiver and rebound, he has 
lost that health. When his stomach refuses to give him 
appetite or nourishment, his feet wander and grow feeble, 
and " his bones are smitten with a sore disease," so that 
he ^* could roar from the very disquietude of his heart," 
his peace has fled for ever. 

But a man often has the power to keep well, if he likes ; 
and a life of useful work and temperate living brings on an 



296 THE BETTER SELF. 

old age like a mild and good Winter, " frosty but kindly." 

Old Adam, in " As You Like It," the only part, except the 

Ghost in " Hamlet," in which Shakspere ever played, has a 

capital recipe — for peace of body, at least — 

** Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty : 
For in my youth I never did apply 
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood, 
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo 
The means of weakness and debility ; 
Therefore my age is as a lusty winter, 
Frosty, but kindly." 

It is pleasant to know that the portrait of sweet Will, to 
which Ben Jonson has written such a strong attestation as to 
its excellent likeness, is said to have been taken in the 
antique costume of the part wherein he delivers so wise a 
lecture to young men. 

" Peace I give unto you," relates to the peace of mind 
which the great Physician of our souls knew was of more 
importance than the other. Its motto might be, " Without 
Me, nothing;" for, indeed, its absence ruins everything; 
and that, too, is very easy of acquirement, while it is the 
most seldom acquired of all. The envious, restless, active 
man, does not get it. He who wants faith in God or in 
man mu?t be without it ; he who is covetous and envious 
must, perforce, go without it; he who loves gold, power, 
greeting, friends, and all the good things in the world, must 
often miss it. He wants more than he can get ; and want 



PEACE. 297 

is, perforce, his master. He Avho plots against the peace of 
others, and lays mines to blow into the air the fortunes of 
his rival, loses it ; he who gives himself over to any folly 
or sin must go without it ; for although the sin may be 
pleasant for a time, hereafter it will reproach him ; and in 
the dead of the night, when the rain is on the roof, and the 
south wind sighs round the corners of the house like a 
wailing ghost, and the long shadows cast by the night light 
tremble and flicker, the poor man will know what he has 
lost. Poor man ! why should we say so ? We naturally 
hate these disturbers of human peace — those who rob the 
orphan, and devour widows' houses ; those who sweep the 
poor man's gains into their pockets, and trouble all good 
men with their ungodly greed. There are some pious souls 
who insist that part of the happiness of the good will be 
the eternal contemplation of the destruction and punish- 
ment of sin, and that wickedness will be perpetually 
reminded of its miserable folly by a perpetual state of 
misery and an utter want of peace. 

We go not so far with them, but we certainly pity not 
the wicked when they get pinched in this world. When the 
rogue has a rope round his neck, and the rascal yells out at 
the whipping post, we have no maundering pity for them. 
They had a thousand warnings before they got so far as 
that ; they occasioned tears and groans enough ; they gave 
pain enough from the time when they disobeyed their 



298 THE BETTER SELF. 

father, mother, pastors, and masters, to the days when they 
broke a poor woman's jaw with an iron chisel for the sake 
of a few corns, or disabled a child for life for the gratifica- 
tion of a lower passion. • Pray Heaven for these silly men 
that their punishment comes in this world. Let us ask 
that conscience may waken and haunt them as they lie at 
home or walk abroad, that they may never know sweet 
peace of mind, that they may toss restlessly upon their 
couch, and that every ill-gotten fruit may turn to dust and 
ashes in their mouths. Let us pray for this. 

But indeed we need not Good supplications are 
answered before they are made ; all that any good man 
can pray for is the will of God, and that we know is against 
the wicked and on the side of the good. To the latter he 
gives peace of mind ; the former has none of it, and is ill at 
ease. He is the man who flieth when no one pursueth, 
and who suspects everybody to be a rogue because he 
knows that he himself is one. He it is who never gets any 
satisfaction out of anything ; to whom all is barren, and for 
whom every fruit is tasteless, and every pleasure vapid, idle, 
and worthless. He may call in the doctor ; but he is of no 
use, for who indeed " can minister to a mind diseased ? " 

** Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ; 
Rr.ze out the written troubles of the brain ; 
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, 
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff 
That weighs upon the heart." 



PEA CE. 299 

Shakspere is, as usual, true in everything. The grief of 
guilt does indeed prey upon the heart ; and some terrible 
criminals who have battled long with life and fought hard 
with the devil, have died of degeneration of the heart. The 
walls of that muscular organ have grown so thin that the 
finger of a child could pierce them, or the blood thrown 
back upon it by the turmoil of the brain has ruptured it, 
so that the man has died. He that plays with the devil 
need be cunning indeed. At best he spends a few years 
in gilded misery, and knows not even then how^ bad a 
bargain he has made. 

But the good, conscientious, honest man, cannot well be 
w^ithout peace. Seasons may go wrong, and the world be 
disturbed, as it is at present, but having done his best, he 
awaits the turn of the tide. He alone is happy when others 
are fleeing away over half the earth to dissipate their 
thoughts. He enjoys the landscape from his cottage door, 
or the view of the housetops trom his back parlour window. 
Says jog-trot Sh en stone : — 

** Would you taste the tranquil scene, 
Be sure your bosoms are serene : 
Devoid of bate, devoid of strife. 
Devoid of all that poisons life : 
And much it Vails you in their place 
To graft the love of human race.'' 

Well, von may find it difficult to do that, rememberino- 

o 

what the human race is \ but you can cultivate the true four- 



300 THE BETTER SELF. 

leaved shamrock — fear of God, faith, hope, and charity— 
and you will find even that. The human race has become 
so silly and changeable of late, so fond of innovation, so 
ready for pictured finery, bran new politics, tinselled and 
illustrated worship, and so ready to abandon the safe old 
ways for that which is a mere novelty, that it finds not 
favour with good men, and is hardly the ground whereon to 
cultivate true peace of mind. For the chief source of that, 
we all look somewhat higher ; — far above the tree-tops and 
the mountains and the high-sailing clouds — far above earth 
— even to Heaven itself. 



THE END. 



\ 



